I was constantly anxious and didn't want to leave my room." "I live in a small southern town so I thought the whole town knew. "Maybe it was an act of conscious self-sabotage because I knew my cousin and I knew he would spread it around," he said. Nickerson's depression was made worse when, in his early 20s, he made the mistake of confiding in a cousin his attraction to young girls. I just want to die.' All day, for days on end." "There were days when I got up and it was all I could think about. "I look back on it now and find it amazing that I never got to the point where I picked up a gun and ended it," he told me. Struggling to come to terms with his sexual identity caused him many years of crippling depression. Todd Nickerson is a 42-year-old pedophile from Tennessee. "So you stew in your isolation, which certainly makes one depressed." "When you have a sexual preference that is as stigmatizing as pedophilia, then there's nowhere to go with it, there's no one to really talk to about it," said Professor Michael Miner, one of the study's co-authors. A 1999 study of pedophilic sex offenders by the University of Minnesota's Department of Family Medicine and Community Health found that 76 percent had suffered from major depression in their life and another 9 percent met the criteria for mild depression. Sure enough, happy pedophiles seem to be the minority. "How in the world can anyone go through every day living with this curse and not want to fling themselves off the nearest bridge on a daily basis?" "When I hear other pedophiles tell me that they are even relatively happy in life, I sometimes am tempted to ask them what fucking planet they live on," said Brett (not his real name), a 40-year-old landscaper who lives with his parents in the suburbs of a major US city and has suffered with depression since his early teens, when he first realized he was attracted to children. For many pedophiles, that reality is the source of major depression. But pedophilia can be especially hard to live with for those who haven't committed a crime, and are forced to come to terms with an identity that most people regard as monstrous.
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