Dating Kinky
Throwback Thursday: How To Avoid The Crazies In Kink—A Practical Guide
August 27, 2020
A conversation a few days ago in a local kink newbies group about people in kink being more likely to have mental issues than the general public, especially submissives, I feel like this needs to be addressed.
Find the transcript for this episode here.

https://www.livescience.com/34832-bdsm-healthy-psychology.html

BDSM practitioners don't appear to be more troubled than the general population. They were more extroverted, more open to new experiences and more conscientious than vanilla participants; they were also less neurotic, a personality trait marked by anxiety. BDSM aficionados also scored lower than the general public on rejection sensitivity, a measure of how paranoid people are about others disliking them.

People in the BDSM scene reported higher levels of well-being in the past two weeks than people outside it, and they reported more secure feelings of attachment in their relationships, the researchers found.

Of the BDSM practitioners, 33 percent of the men reported being submissive, 48 percent dominant and 18 percent "switch," or willing to switch between submissive and dominant roles in bed. About 75 percent of the female BDSM respondents were submissive, 8 percent dominant and 16 percent switch. [10 Surprising Sex Statistics]

These roles showed some links to psychological health, such that dominants tended to score highest in all quarters, submissives lowest and switches in the middle. However, submissives never scored lower than vanilla participants on mental health, and frequently scored higher, Wismeijer told LiveScience.

"Within the BDSM community, [submissives] were always perceived as the most vulnerable, but still, there was not one finding in which the submissives scored less favorable than the controls," he said.