Ricerc@Sapienza

Summary: Helplines are common counselling services for men and women seeking advice forhealth, psychological and sexual problems. With the advent of the social media era, users havenow more possibilities to search for information about sexual health than before. Comparing therecent data of a long-standing telephone counselling service on sexual health by the Instituteof Clinical Sexology of Rome, we aimed to investigate the range of sexual concerns reported byusers, to describe the differences, if any, between male and female callers, and the changes incontents and usage in the last years. The study included selected records of the calls receivedduring the 8-year period between 2010 and 2017 (n = 1865). Users were more often men thanwomen (respectively 1253 vs. 612), aged between 26 and 45 years, medium to high education,employed, and who had not sought any previous help for their sexual concerns. The most fre-quently reported reasons to call were ‘‘male sexual dysfunctions’’ and ‘‘relational problems’’.Comparing with previous data, a decrease of requests about specific sexual dysfunctions andsexual general information is noted. Moreover, some gender peculiarities are reported, and thecounsellor actions to the user request are analysed. Although the service registered a decreaseof calls in after the social media spreading, in the last years a new increase of calls and a switchin requests’ contents has been showed. Telephone counselling is still an important and effectiveresource to elicit requests that otherwise might remain hidden; therefore, it can be a usefullink between health-care system and callers.© 2018 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.