Sex addiction is not all about sex. “That’s a common misconception,” says Rory Reid, PhD, LCSW, a research psychologist at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. “It is no more about sex than an eating disorder is about food or pathological gambling is about money.” Sex addicts, in other words, are not simply people who crave lots of sex. Instead, they have underlying problems -stress, anxiety, depression, shame — that drive their often risky sexual behavior.