Healthier Scotland. Scottish Government

A Sex Therapist can help with all sorts of sex difficulties. Male problems, like problems with erection, problems with premature ejaculation. For both sexes, loss of interest in sex. I see gay and straight couples, I see people who may have been to afraid to start a relationship because they have a problem. I also see people who have had traumas like sexual abuse in childhood and perhaps struggling to get over that. You don’t have to be in a relationship to see a Sex Therapist. If you have a worry with your sex life then were there to help.

If you were a patient coming to see me, usually you would have been referred by your G.P. or perhaps another professional, though I do see patients who self-refer because sometimes patients with sexual difficulties are embarrassed to discuss these things with their G.P. that they may have known for a very long time. You then have an appointment at the clinic and at that appointment you would have plenty of time to talk to me about your difficulty and I would be able to let you know what sort of treatment is on option.

Confidentiality is essential in the work that I do as a Sex Therapist, the notes for patients who attend my clinic at the Royal are kept completely separate from the main medical records, so they never actually leave our department. We will only contact the patient’s G.P. if the patient is happy with that, though mostly they have come via the G.P. so they are already aware, but it is actually in a very discreet part of the hospital and we have a very quiet separate waiting area. So people don’t need to worry that they’ll bump into lots of other people at the time.

I think the fears that people have are that they have a really difficult and unique problem and that it is going to be very hard to solve. People with a sexual problem often imagine that they are the only person in the world suffering from this problem because people with problems don’t tend to talk about them and so you imagine that everybody else is having a fab sex life and you’re the only one who is not. But in fact sexual problems are very common and in fact one survey showed that about 50% of the population will have a sexual difficulty at some time in their lives.

It’s never too late to get improvement in your sex life and in fact I think the trouble with human beings is they are in sexual relationships for a very long time and it is difficult to keep these sex lives exciting and vibrant. It would certainly do no harm for many people to just talk things over with a Sex Therapist and get some ideas about livening things up.