A 38-year-old man repeatedly tries to force his wife to have sex in the middle of the night but has no memory of his actions when he wakes up.
A married woman in her mid-20s often tears off her clothing and masturbates but remembers nothing when her partner rouses her.
For a dozen years, a 31-year-old man masturbates while asleep, at times injuring his groin. Embarrassed due to his unconscious behavior, he avoids relationships for eight years.
These are all clinically documented cases of sleep sex, or sexsomnia, part of a family of sleep disorders called parasomnias that include sleepwalking, sleep talking, sleep eating and sleep terrors.
Medicine is really biopsychosocial. Meaning, we’re biological, psychological, and social beings, and often a cause isn’t as cut and dry as it is in the traditional view of medicine. It’s the chicken and the egg.
Is the body causing depression, is the mind, is the environment? Sometimes it’s one of these factors, but often it’s some combination or a combination of all three and often these factors can have feedback loops within them (my jobs sucks, so I drink which makes my job harder which makes it suck more, so I drink harder)
So really, things have to be looked at on multiple levels and in the above situation in particular, psychological treatment should always be part of a multimodal approach because of the psychosocial adjustment element at play and the stress it would cause on the organism (whole person, body and mind).