Sexually violent predators (SVP) constitute a serious potential risk to public safety, especially when they are released after too short a prison sentence. Twenty states and the federal government have developed a seemingly convenient way to reduce this risk. They have passed statutes that allow for the involuntary (often lifetime) psychiatric commitment of mentally disordered sexual offenders ...

The category of "Not Otherwise Specified" (NOS) for DSM-based psychiatric diagnosis has typically retained diagnoses whose rarity, empirical criterion validation or symptomatic expression has been insufficient to be codified. This article reviews the literature on Telephone Scatologia, Necrophilia, Zoophilia, Urophilia, Coprophilia, and Partialism. Based on extant data, no changes are suggested...

Autogynephilia is defined as a male's propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female. It is the paraphilia that is theorized to underlie transvestism and some forms of male-to-female (MtF) transsexualism. Autogynephilia encompasses sexual arousal with cross-dressing and cross-gender expression that does not involve women's clothing per se. The concept of autogynephilia ...

Human sexual instincts can become fixated on a wide variety of targets, resulting in behaviours ranging from harmless fetishism to child abuse. The recent flood of investigations into historic cases in the UK has brought child protection issues to the top of the news agenda and shown that society is still far from addressing these problems in a rational, evidence-based way maximising harm reduc...

The DSM-IV-TR (2000) sets its own standards for inclusion of diagnoses and for changes in its text. The Paraphilia section is analyzed from the perspective of how well the DSM meets those standards. The concept of Paraphilias as psychopathology was analyzed and assessed critically to determine if it meets the definition of a mental disorder presented in the DSM; it does not. The Paraphilia diag...

There is legitimate concern in the psychiatric community about the constitutionality of sexually violent predator (SVP) commitment statutes. Such constitutionality depends on the requirement that a sexual offender have a mental abnormality that makes him commit violent predatory sex offenses and reflects almost exclusively a concern for public safety, with little regard for notions of clinical ...

The paraphilia section of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR) is being misinterpreted in the forensic evaluations of sexually violent offenders. The resulting misuse of the term paraphilia not otherwise specified, hebephilia, has justified the inappropriate involuntary commitment of individuals who do not in fact qualify for a DSM-IV-...

In the past two decades, public fear and antipathy toward sexual offenders have led to public registries of their names and addresses, longer prison sentences, consideration of the death penalty, and civil commitment laws that allow potentially lifetime preventive detention after these offenders complete prison sentences. Twenty states and the federal government have enacted such civil commitme...