Question:
How does attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) affect your sex life?
Answer
From the limited scientific evidence, there are no major differences in sexual function or dysfunction between groups of people who have ADHD and those who don’t.
A couple of reviews of the scientific literature suggest there may be some effects, but the quality of the studies that were reviewed isn’t great. For example, one study compared data collected from people attending an ADHD clinic in 2008-9 with data from national survey reports published either two to three years earlier or in 2009, of people aged on average seven to nine years older. Basically, they weren’t comparing apples with apples.
Lots of the data from existing studies seem contradictory. There are suggestions that males with ADHD might have higher sex drives than others, but also that males with ADHD are more likely to want to avoid having sex. This just goes to show how the thoughts and behaviours of people with ADHD are different between individuals. That’s what you’d expect, given the range of symptoms of ADHD, and is just another example of how generalisations about ADHD and other types of neurodiversity are inappropriate.
So, there is no convincing evidence to suggest that ADHD has strong effects on people’s sex lives outside of variations that you might observe throughout any diverse group of people.
Although the data aren’t great, one concerning thing reported in a few studies is that people with ADHD may have higher rates of sexual victimization. No amount of sexual victimization is acceptable for anyone.
If you’re concerned that the symptoms of ADHD are having a negative effect on your sex life, you should talk to your doctor. That goes for everyone, whatever their concern is, whether they have ADHD or not.
Tim Moss
Healthy Male Health Content Manager
Associate Professor Tim Moss has PhD in physiology and more than 20 years’ experience as a biomedical research scientist. Tim stepped away from his successful academic career at the end of 2019, to apply his skills in turning complicated scientific and medical knowledge into information that all people can use to improve their health and wellbeing. Tim has written for crikey.com and Scientific American’s Observations blog, which is far more interesting than his authorship of over 150 academic publications. He has studied science communication at the Alan Alda Centre for Communicating Science in New York, and at the Department of Biological Engineering Communication Lab at MIT in Boston.
