Many Americans can’t understand why people like former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner continue to engage in sexting activities even after this behavior has destroyed their lives – and the lives of those they love. Why can’t they stop?

Writing for FoxNews.com, Dr. Keith Ablow, a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team, explains why men like Anthony Weiner, who is married to longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin and who was recently caught sexting with his four year-old son in bed next to him, continue to engage in this destructive behavior.

Even though Dr. Ablow has never met or examined Weiner, whose political career went up in smoke several years ago when he was caught texting sexually explicit selfies to women, he says the compulsion to send these photos can be as addictive as heroin.

“Texting and sexting are as addictive to millions of people as heroin,” Dr. Ablow writes. “I mean it. Hence, the question about Anthony Weiner sending explicit material via text is not different than questions about why successful, married men would gamble away their homes or risk arrest and cerebrovascular accidents (strokes) by buying and inhaling lines of cocaine.”

Science is only now beginning to understand how little restraint many people have over electronic communications because to some degree these new technologies, both neurologically and psychologically, can short-circuit their better judgment.

“I have testified in cases, for example, in which men who would never, in their wildest imaginations, even remotely consider handing out naked photos of themselves to anyone, send such photos to 15-year-old girls over the Internet,” Dr. Ablow said.

“They do this seemingly without regard to the fact that those they are sexting could easily be (and sometimes are) middle-aged men or FBI agents posing as 15-year-old girls. They take extreme risks because they are ‘high’ on technology—literally intoxicated by it.”

Second, he claims that no psychiatrist worth his or her salt would dismiss the fact that anyone who would take an explicit photo of himself which in bed beside a toddler could be a person with a history of sexual abuse.

“To be more specific, if an adult had been touched inappropriately in bed by a parent, then unwittingly staging a similar scene, and sharing it, would make a terrible kind of unconscious sense. And, of course, a history of sexual abuse is one reason someone could become addicted to sex (or sexting), to begin with,” Dr. Ablow writes.

Third, marriage can too often become a “barren landscape” full of unmet sexual needs that are too easily satisfied on the Internet.

“ . . . [A]s a psychiatrist, I know at least a dozen married men and women who have also been caught, at least twice. They keep doing it because they don’t particularly want to end their marriages, and they don’t want to have actual affairs, but they don’t want to live entirely passionless lives.”

Weiner reportedly said as much to the woman he was caught sexting with, complaining that he only had relations with his wife once every two months.

But sexting isn’t the answer to whatever might be driving Weiner, or millions of others, to this kind of behavior.

“Whatever is happening inside the mind of Anthony Weiner, it’s time for him to delve deeply into it, with the help of a therapist. The same could be said for millions of married, technology-addicted Americans, of course—whether their behavior reflects problems in their psyches, in their marriages, or both.”

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