Psychiatry and Clinical Psychopharmacology

Successful treatment of a male pedophile with risperidone and cognitive-behavioral therapy

Psychiatry and Clinical Psychopharmacology 2014; 24: Supplement S237-S237
Read: 2022 Published: 17 February 2021

Pedophilia is a psychiatric disorder of a person older than 16 years old that is characterized by sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a pre-pubescent child (aged 13 years or younger). These fantasies are acted out and cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulties. Pedophilia is a common and often overlooked syndrome that risks the child victim’s well-being and further psychosocial development and adaptive functioning. N.B. was a 46-year-old, single, and unemployed primary school graduate male patient. A week before his admission to our clinic, the patient was arrested after performing a verbal abuse towards 10 year old male child. The child’s family had withdrawn their complaint about him upon negotiations with elder brother of the patient and the patient was released. In addition, the patient has been accused through ongoing lawsuits about the sexual abuses he was thought to have made in the past. Because of the sexual abuses towards male children, the patient was taken to the psychiatry service with the prediagnosis of pedophilia after the polyclinic application. N.B. stated that he had been raped at the age of 16. Following this incident, he also had a history of being abused by the sexual abuser many times through engaging in activities like watching porn films and being forced to have oral and anal sex against his own will. The person abusing N.B. had also taught him how to perform sexual harassment by seducing children. In the wake of this incident, the patient had often performed sexual harassments towards male children. He said he used to watch those children in the playgrounds for a while, and then he used to approach a child if there were no adults around, made friends with him and played with him for a while. He used to harass those children about whom he was convinced that they would never tell their families what he did to them. N.B. stated that he has never forced children to do anything against their will and that he performed no physical violence to any of them. He expressed he used to be interested in male children, that he never had any sexual desire or interest in females of any age or adult males and that he had no sexual experience. Multifactorial mechanisms are currently considered responsible for pedophilia especially genetic factors, the individual’s own personal experience of being a victim of sexual abuse and neurobiological factors. Psychotherapeutic and pharmaceutical treatment options will be discussed. Medical treatment and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) are the methods of choice in the treatment of pedophilia. In this article, our objective is to present options for the treatment of pedophilia by performing the follow-up of the pedophilic case and reviewing the biopsychosocial attributes of this case through the CBT-based interviews in addition to the risperidone treatment.

EISSN 2475-0581