IN DEPTH • Part 1
OnlyFans What Intimacy Costs. Part 1: The Women Paying to Feel Chosen
By Ruth Ellery
At 37, Claire had a career, a home and money in the bank. Then a paid pseudo-relationship emptied the account. I went looking for the male creators selling intimacy—and found the same pull waiting for me
On payday, Claire watched for her salary to clear with the concentration of somebody waiting for medical results. The money had already acquired a destination. Some of it would go to the ordinary machinery of adult life; some would buy another chance of being answered by a man she had never met and, in all likelihood, never would. Once the payment had gone, a second wait began. There might be a message that afternoon, late that night, or nothing until the uncertainty became unbearable enough to justify sending something else.
“I know it isn’t real,” she would tell me. “I just don’t know how to stop.”
Claire is a pseudonym. At 25, she owned a four-bedroom townhouse. She had worked two jobs through university, become a technology manager and paid privately for medical treatment when serious health problems made waiting an unaffordable luxury. By 37, she had friends, her own home and a diary that made lunch require an invitation. She could anticipate a project failure six months before the people paid to notice it. She understood budgets, systems and sales tactics. None of this prevented her from spending on pornography and OnlyFans until the money ran out.
This is the point at which people begin searching for the defect that will place a safe distance between themselves and her. Perhaps she was naïve, isolated or reckless, one of those people who sends gift cards to a prince with a complicated inheritance. She was none of those things. Her life looked accomplished because it was. Yet inside it, she could spend hours waiting for a stranger’s reply, then wait for the next paycheque to purchase another possibility of receiving one. Awareness made the arrangement more humiliating; it did not make the attachment less persuasive.
Stories about men spending fortunes on online creators are usually served as grotesque comedy: the lonely fool, the unattainable woman, the bank statement that deserves its own intervention. The joke reassures everybody who does not resemble its protagonist.
Women customers disturb the script.
We have desire, grief, boredom, private kinks and the wish to be singled out from a crowd. We also have strong incentives to remain silent when the experience leaves us financially bruised and faintly ridiculous. OnlyFans does not publish a reliable gender breakdown of its adult creators and customers, and academic researchers note that the available demographic estimates are limited; the male-creator, female-customer market is culturally elusive even if nobody can say precisely how small it is.
Its customers are present. Their stories rarely are.
Claire’s story arrived during another conversation that had already unsettled me. A friend who works therapeutically with children told me that, in his own caseload, he believed more than half of the under-13s he saw had developed what he described as a psychological dependence on pornography. That is one clinician’s observation, filtered through a specialist population; it cannot be inflated into national prevalence, and children who encounter pornography are not miniature OnlyFans customers.
The wider evidence remains difficult to dismiss. Research commissioned by the Children’s Commissioner for England found an average age of first exposure of 13. Ten per cent of respondents who had seen online pornography reported seeing it by nine, often accidentally and sometimes on the same social platforms where children watched jokes, football clips and make-up tutorials.
I began to wonder what happens when sexual imagery arrives before a child has acquired much language for consent, intimacy or commerce. What will that adult recognise when attention, arousal and payment appear inside the same interface? If the first lesson is abundance without context, and the later lesson is that personal acknowledgement can be unlocked for a fee, what sort of relationship education has taken place in between?
I was not approaching sexual commerce as an offended civilian. I once worked face-to-face as a professional dominatrix. Fantasy was my business, but fantasy had edges. Before a session, I established what the customer was buying, what would remain off limits and where the encounter ended. The boundary did not spoil the fantasy. It allowed both of us to enter it without pretending that payment had opened a private door into my life.
I do not regard sexual work as inherently exploitative, nor do I mistake prudishness for ethics. Sex has been sold for longer than most institutions currently attempting to regulate it, and it will survive every moral panic scheduled on its behalf. At its best, subscription pornography can give performers unusual control over production and distribution while giving adults a consensual place to explore tastes poorly represented by the pneumatic sameness of mainstream porn.
The ethical questions are practical: Are the adults consenting? Is the worker safe and fairly paid? Does the customer understand the service? Can either person end it without being punished for having believed the stated terms?
Face-to-face, the negotiation had been part of the work. Online, I became interested in the possibility that vagueness was doing the most profitable labour.
The funnel
I opened ChatGPT and asked it to help me build a working list of male OnlyFans creators. I wanted variation rather than a parade of interchangeable torsos: different identities, intended audiences, levels of fame, promotional styles and degrees of explicitness. I considered the quieter variables that make an online stranger feel reachable—shared interests, humour, physical distance, time-zone compatibility, public-facing non-explicit social media presence that links through to explicit content, the impression that a person might plausibly notice you.
The list was a reporting map, never evidence; names generated by a machine are leads requiring verification, not facts wearing a clever interface.
My aim was to follow the transaction from its innocent beginning to its less photogenic end. How did a creator advertise before money was mentioned? Which parts of a personality were offered freely, and which appeared only when the paywall came into view? How was a new customer moved from public joke or fitness clip to private message, then from private message to subscription, tip or locked video?
Most importantly, what happened when the spending frightened the person doing it?
I could see the entrances everywhere. I wanted to find the marked exit.
OnlyFans itself is one layer of a larger system. Research into the platform’s labour structure has found that creators commonly perform the unpaid promotional work elsewhere, directing followers from platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and X towards the paywall.
The sexual material may be waiting at the destination, but personality does the travelling.
A joke, a confession about mental health, a photograph from the gym, a complaint about an ordinary bad day: these things establish affinity before the first price appears. The product is rarely a naked body alone. The internet has made those plentiful. The scarce product is proximity—the possibility that this particular body might turn towards you.
Searching was less salacious than administrative at first. Profiles accumulated in tabs; public feeds offered the usual mixture of skin, aspiration and studied informality. Some creators projected polished distance. Others made their lives seem pleasantly cluttered and available, full of hobbies, complaints and private-looking jokes. A customer could choose beauty almost anywhere. Character was the more effective lure, especially when it resembled one’s own.
I selected a creator whose non-explicit social videos had made me laugh. That mattered more than his sexual sales pitch.
I had recently lost my father and my best friend and responded to grief by working until exhaustion made reflection administratively impossible. Laughter had become scarce enough to feel medicinal, and here was a stranger producing it casually through my telephone. His OnlyFans profile promised “pleasure and fun”, a guarantee broad enough to cover a seaside pier, a package holiday or several regrettable cocktails.
I entered with rules that seemed almost comically sturdy. I would not intentionally view, buy or subscribe to paid explicit material. My questions would concern his experience as a male creator: the money, workload, audience and effect on privacy and relationships. When I had finished, I would delete the account.
I had designed the boundaries myself, understood the business from the other side and knew why I was there. I mistook that knowledge for armour.
I followed his account first (among a handful of others) but I was somewhat dumbstruck when one followed me back almost immediately. He initiated the conversation and encouraged it to continue. Nothing in the opening exchange was especially erotic; that was precisely why it felt potent. Sexual salesmanship would have been easy to classify and resist. Ordinary conversation passed beneath the alarm system.
When he spoke to me like a person, the day became a little less lonely, and the old professional part of my mind supplied the warning even as the rest of me enjoyed ignoring it: this may be the sale before the sale.
Then came the bargaining, quick and embarrassingly fluent.
Perhaps I could spend a small amount. Perhaps one locked clip would count as research. He seemed genuinely interested; maybe this was an exception, or an unusual conversation occurring inside a commercial setting rather than because of it. If the connection became real, would paying for the doorway matter?
I had once been paid to construct fantasy under explicit conditions. Within hours, I was trying to renegotiate my own boundaries when the roles were reversed.
The experience had already escaped the category I had assigned it. I was no longer simply observing a sales funnel. I was checking for replies when I had work open in another window, returning to the tab without deciding to, feeling the small lift when a message appeared and the disproportionate flatness when it did not.
Nothing spectacular had to happen. That was the danger. The mechanism did not require delusion; it required only that commercial attention occasionally feel indistinguishable from ordinary warmth.
What the tip bought
When I told him that I was researching the lives of male creators and would not be buying sexual content, he thanked me for my honesty. The conversation cooled with remarkable speed.
I sent a tip anyway, not just because he had made me laugh but because I had taken up some of his time with no intention of purchasing anything and it felt like the respectful move to make by supporting another professional in a career I once inhabited too. I attached to a message whose wording was deliberately complete:
“Just to say thank you—your videos on social made me laugh harder than they should have and I needed that.”
I requested no photograph, no reply, no continuation. The tip was gratitude for a joke that had reached me during a bad season. I have previously bought tickets to comedy shows where I had spent more and laughed less, so this felt like a nice way to honour the humour it had brought to my day. There were no expectations, not really anyway, attached to this.
The payment cleared. But the message stayed unread.
He owed me neither affection nor an unpaid interview, and a voluntary tip does not secretly purchase a claim on another person. I had spent years insisting on the same principle from the other side of paid intimacy.
Yet the withdrawal was brutal in its efficiency. In almost any other industry, what followed would be recognised as poor or even rude customer service, however flawlessly the payment itself had been processed. Conversation had flowed while I resembled future income; once I made clear that I would not become it, even reading “thank you” became surplus labour.
The platform completed the only exchange it was designed to recognise: the tip arrived, while the gratitude attached to it remained unread. Was the silence a necessary professional boundary, or an avoidable sting whose force would fall hardest on the customers most susceptible to purchased attention and its sudden withdrawal?
That unread marker was not proof of what had happened to Claire, or evidence that every creator behaves this way. It did give me a glimpse of the structure she had been describing: warmth arriving just often enough to create expectation, money extending the possibility, and silence (or messages left unread) returning when the prospect of further spending disappeared.
My few hours could not be compared with her losses in anyway shape or form. Or anyone else that has fallen prey to predatory practice. This showed why intelligence was such unreliable protection. I knew what the trick was called and still felt its hand on my attention.
When I asked the creator about his working life, his answers had remained vague.
“I love my job, so it doesn’t feel like work,” he told me.
The sentence revealed little about the actual texture of his days, although its smoothness interested me. Perhaps he enjoys performance, exhibition, autonomy, money or the mildly absurd theatre of selling desire through a telephone. Perhaps it was a line polished by repetition, useful for closing questions that did not pay.
I had entered his workplace carrying research; he had entered my attention carrying a sales funnel. Neither set of terms had much use for the other.
I cannot diagnose his character through a chat window, and sexual-content work does not doom anybody to a damaged romantic life. The occupational question is still worth asking. What happens when warmth becomes customer acquisition, flirtation carries a price and sudden absence becomes routine boundary enforcement?
A 2025 qualitative study of OnlyFans creators described “strategic intimacy”, surface acting and emotional disengagement. Those practices may protect a creator’s privacy and sanity in work that attracts stigma, harassment and entitled customers. They may also create a peculiar spillover: affection begins to resemble labour, private disclosure resembles inventory and ordinary reciprocity acquires the faint air of a service being given away.
That left another question. Who teaches boundaries to a person who downloads an app, verifies an identity and discovers that personality can be converted into micro-payments?
I do not know what training this creator received, if any, in emotional labour, signs of compulsive spending or the management of customers who confuse repeated access with reciprocity. The platform can industrialise intimacy while leaving creators to improvise its emotional safety. It receives its percentage whichever version they invent.
The male creator occupies a particularly interesting corner of this economy though. The cultural picture of OnlyFans remains overwhelmingly female creator and male fan, which can make a man selling to women appear rarer, more personally available and, through scarcity alone, more valuable.
A queue of admirers may be merely an audience; but it may also become a pedestal. If attention is abundant and replaceable, disappearance becomes cheap and routine. If a woman objects, she risks sounding as though she believed herself entitled to the very intimacy she knows she purchased only in imitation.
After deleting my account, I researched the creator’s public history and found an online account from a woman alleging that he had flown her to Miami, arranged a hotel, slept with her and then severed contact, leaving her stranded while a storm disrupted travel. Her account also included remarks involving their behaviour and drug use.
I have not independently verified her story, so it cannot responsibly be presented as fact, corroboration or psychological evidence; publication would require the original material, further reporting and a right of reply.
What unsettled me was the rhythm she described at a far higher human cost: accelerated access, followed by absolute detachment when another person became inconvenient or unprofitable. The allegation did not explain him. It made the question harder to dismiss.
Was OnlyFans simply the most explicit showroom for a use-and-discard culture already spreading beyond sex into everyday society—acquire access, enjoy the attention, close the tab the moment reciprocity begins to cost something? Intimacy has always demanded time, patience, compromise and the discomfort of remaining answerable to another person. A payment button can make those obligations appear optional; the more disturbing question is what happens when we carry that training back into rooms where nobody is being paid.
The exit nobody designed
OnlyFans is operated from London, which makes it difficult for Britain to dismiss the platform as an American curiosity whose consequences have yet to cross the Atlantic. In 2024, it recorded 377.5 million fan accounts and processed $7.2 billion in payments, according to reported company results. Even its vocabulary softens the transaction: calling a purchaser a fan imports devotion and asymmetry into a marketplace that also sells subscriptions, private messages and the possibility of personal acknowledgement. The resulting ambiguity is commercially useful. A customer may never be entirely certain whether she is paying for content, access or the feeling that somebody has noticed her.
Whether this amounts to a pornography epidemic cannot be settled with a dramatic noun. A 2024 study of 213 adults associated loneliness with problematic pornography use, with difficulty regulating emotion helping to explain the relationship, although its design could not establish cause. A 2026 study of young adults found no uniform association between pornography use and suicidal thinking; depression remained the strongest predictor, and the reasons people used pornography mattered. The evidence resists a simple claim that pornography inevitably harms its users, but it leaves a serious question unanswered: when somebody reaches for sexual material or paid attention to relieve grief, loneliness or depression, does a platform selling personalised relief soothe that vulnerability—or learn how to invoice it?
The same restraint is necessary when discussing suicide. In 2024, 6,190 suicides were registered in England and Wales, with the male rate roughly three times the female rate, according to the Office for National Statistics. No credible evidence identifies what proportion, if any, involved pornography, OnlyFans or monetised pseudo-relationships, and inventing one would exploit the very deaths invoked. Yet uncertainty about causation should not become an excuse for ignoring foreseeable risk. Claire knew that the attention was purchased; I entered as a researcher with professional experience of paid fantasy. Neither form of insight cancelled the pull. A customer does not have to believe she is in a relationship. She need only feel relief when the message arrives and its absence when it does not.
Britain’s regulation of pornography has concentrated largely on who may enter and what material may legally exist. Pornographic services must now use highly effective age assurance, and Ofcom has begun fining providers that fail to comply. The law also criminalises the creation of non-consensual sexual deepfakes and the supply of “nudification” tools. Those protections are necessary, but they offer the adult who passes the age check little information about compulsive spending, emotional dependency, delegated messages or the difficulty of detaching from attention delivered unpredictably and withdrawn without explanation.
Other industries demonstrate what regulation looks like once society accepts that ease of access can carry a dire human cost. Tobacco products must display explicit health warnings, while alcohol is sold with strength information and often with unit, pregnancy and support guidance, although Britain’s statutory health-labelling requirements remain incomplete. Online gambling is surrounded by stronger safeguards because a private habit, repeated through a telephone, can become debt and despair before anybody else sees it. British operators must monitor spending, patterns of spending, time and behaviour, intervene when risk appears and participate in GAMSTOP’s cross-company self-exclusion scheme. Gambling advertisers are even prohibited from presenting their product as an escape from loneliness, depression or social isolation, because regulators recognise the danger of selling relief to people in pain. Paid-intimacy platforms operate remarkably close to that emotional territory without comparable scrutiny.
Sex is neither smoke nor a roulette wheel, yet the regulatory principle travels easily: when a commercial system can exploit compulsion, conceal cumulative spending and intensify an existing vulnerability, it should disclose those risks and provide a credible exit. Pornography and OnlyFans should carry prominent warnings about financial and emotional dependency, alongside spending summaries, voluntary limits, cooling-off periods, self-exclusion and discreet routes to specialist support. These measures would neither prohibit pornography nor infantilise its customers. They would acknowledge that consent to a transaction is more meaningful when the possible cost is visible before the first moment of recognition feels personal.
Instead, digital intimacy arrives beneath bright buttons marked subscribe, unlock and tip, as though the only danger were insufficient enthusiasm.
The warning need not declare pornography poisonous or customers incapable of choice. It could state the commercial facts that the atmosphere is designed to soften:
This platform sells content and access.
Personal conversation may be part of a sales strategy.
A reply is not reciprocity.
Messages may be automated or delegated.
Tips may purchase nothing beyond the act of tipping.
Decide spending and time limits before familiarity is established.
The warning should be built into the product rather than buried inside terms nobody reads. Each payment could state exactly what it buys. Human, automated and outsourced messages could be identified. Users could set monthly caps before subscribing, receive cumulative spending notices, activate cooling-off periods and exclude themselves without having to negotiate with the person whose attention they are trying to escape.
A conspicuous route to confidential support should appear beside the route to send more money.
Britain already requires clearer information and easier exits from subscription businesses. Sexual platforms should not receive an exemption because embarrassment makes their customers quieter.
Meaningful friction reduces revenue. That is generally how one recognises consumer protection in the wild!
Deleting an account is technically possible... but emotional detachment is not a menu command. Regulated online gambling offers an uncomfortable comparison. My search through the paid-intimacy funnel found no conspicuous equivalent: no cumulative-risk intervention, no exclusion that follows a customer across platforms, no moment at which the system accepts a duty to interrupt its own revenue.
The burden returned to the customer at the precise moment their judgment was most entangled with the product. They had to supply the interruption themselves, usually in private, often after the money and dignity they thought they possessed had already been used as evidence against them.
For some, this becomes the sunk-cost effect in its most intimate form. Once money, hours, disclosures and hope have been invested in one creator, leaving can feel less like preventing further loss than declaring every previous sacrifice meaningless. Another payment appears capable of redeeming the last; another reply might prove that the connection mattered after all. They return to the same person for a diminishing fix, even as the attempt to justify what has already been spent begins consuming whatever remains.
Claire has now withdrawn from the arrangement, although the payments stopped before the wanting did. Therapy is wedged into a working week already arranged to the minute; between appointments, she attends online support groups in the time once surrendered to waiting for him. She is trying to understand what the messages anaesthetised—grief, loneliness, exhaustion, perhaps the strain of being the capable one for too long—and why recognising the transaction never prevented it from acquiring the force of need.
Cautionary tales prefer their women chastened and simplified; Claire has obliged neither preference. She remains funny enough to make the whole business sound absurd, with an anger that refuses to let the absurdity excuse the harm. Her recovery proceeds through unglamorous acts: opening the bank statements, saying aloud what she spent and what she hoped it might buy, then enduring the quiet in which another payment once promised relief. Her phone still lights up; but his name is no longer the event around which her day arranges itself.
If pornography use or spending has begun to govern work, finances, sleep or relationships, shame is not a treatment plan. The NHS recommends speaking to a GP when behaviour feels beyond control or causes harm; the NHS CUBE Clinic offers confidential help with pornography and other internet use to eligible UCL students, while a GP can help people elsewhere find appropriate local care.
Tell one trusted person before secrecy persuades you that it is protecting you. If despair has become suicidal thoughts, Samaritans answers free on 116 123; immediate danger belongs with 999 or A&E.
I deleted my account before bargaining could harden into a bank statement. Fewer than twenty-four hours and one ordinary conversation had left me frightened by the speed of my own response—mentally crowded, emotionally scraped raw and socially depleted. I was less afraid of the creator than of the negotiations already taking place inside my head: one exception, one purchase, one more chance to discover whether his interest might survive outside the sales pitch. Pressing delete felt less like completing my research than leaving a room whose air had changed without my noticing.
No amount of competence, cynicism, sexual experience or financial independence extinguishes the wish to be loved, recognised and chosen. That ordinary human appetite is precisely what makes monetised attention so persuasive. Meaningful attention asks for time, patience, reciprocity and the inconvenience of another person’s full humanity; when contact instead requires you to calm your nervous system after every silence and reopen a payment link before warmth returns, it may be exhilarating, seductive and briefly consoling, but it is unlikely to add anything durable to your day.
Claire had waited paycheque after paycheque for a person to appear; I had needed one day to feel the same mechanism begin reorganising my concentration. A platform can list the price of a subscription, clip or tip to the penny, but it cannot calculate what the cycle may extract in sleep, work, debt, privacy or self-trust—or the months later spent teaching a nervous system that silence is not an emergency and longing is not an invoice.
On my final screen, the tip was marked cleared and the message remained unread: the system knew exactly what I had paid and had no field for what the exchange might take in return.
Coming next week in OnlyFans: What Intimacy Costs…
If this article stayed with you, the series continues next week.
Part 2: I Tried OnlyFans For Seven Days As a Customer out next week: For seven days, I returned to OnlyFans, this time as a paying customer, and documented what the experience did to my body and my health.
Part 3: Who Are You Really Talking To? the following week: An investigation into the paid chatters often hired to message customers on a creator’s behalf. Many of them are underpaid and work in harrowing conditions that the people they’re messaging never see.
To make sure you don’t miss the next part, sign up to our email newsletter, and follow us on Instagram at @chapterandchronicle and on Facebook for new articles, stories and updates every week.
References
All online sources were accessed on 8 November 2026.
Children’s Commissioner for England (2023) ‘A lot of it is actually just abuse’: Young people and pornography. London: Children’s Commissioner for England. Available at: https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/resource/a-lot-of-it-is-actually-just-abuse-young-people-and-pornography
Crown Prosecution Service (2026) Cybercrime: prosecution guidance. Updated 29 June 2026. London: CPS. Available at: https://www.cps.gov.uk/prosecution-guidance/cybercrime-prosecution-guidance
Department for Business and Trade (2026) Consumers to save around £400 million every year from government crackdown on costly subscription traps. Press release, 2 April 2026. London: GOV.UK. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/consumers-to-save-around-400-million-every-year-from-government-crackdown-on-costly-subscription-traps
Department of Health and Social Care (2024) Standardised packaging for all tobacco products: call for evidence. London: GOV.UK. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/calls-for-evidence/standardised-packaging-for-all-tobacco-products/standardised-packaging-for-all-tobacco-products
Food Standards Agency (2017) Wine labelling. London: GOV.UK. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/wine-labelling/wine-labelling
Gambling Commission (2022) Customer interaction guidance for remote gambling licensees: Requirement 4. Formal guidance under SR Code 3.4.3, last updated 23 August 2023. Birmingham: Gambling Commission. Available at: https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/guidance/customer-interaction-guidance-for-remote-gambling-licensees-formal-guidance/requirement-4-customer-interaction-guidance-for-remote-gambling-licensees-sr
Gambling Commission (2026) Making those at risk safer online. Last updated 17 March 2026. Birmingham: Gambling Commission. Available at: https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/about-us/guide/page/making-those-at-risk-safer-online
Katanich, D. (2025) ‘OnlyFans takes $7.2bn from subscribers in 2024 as adult site booms’, Euronews, 25 August. Available at: https://www.euronews.com/business/2025/08/25/onlyfans-takes-72bn-from-subscribers-in-2024-as-adult-site-booms
NHS (2024) Addiction: what is it? Last reviewed 23 July 2024. Available at: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/addiction-support/addiction-what-is-it/
Ofcom (2026) Ofcom fines porn company £1.35m for not having age checks. 23 February 2026. London: Ofcom. Available at: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/ofcom-fines-porn-company-1.35-million-for-not-having-age-checks
Office for National Statistics (2025) Suicides in England and Wales: 1981 to 2024. Statistical bulletin, released 3 October 2025. Newport: ONS. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/suicidesintheunitedkingdom/2024registrations
[Author surname unknown (2025), Porn Studies. doi: 10.1080/23268743.2025.2501322. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23268743.2025.2501322
Roy, C. and Sameer, A. (2026) ‘Pornography use, motivational patterns and suicidal ideation among young adults: a cross-sectional behavioural analysis’, Annals of Neurosciences. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1177/09727531261450406
Vescan, M., Flack, M. and Caudwell, K.M. (2024) ‘Loneliness and problematic pornography use: what is the role of emotion regulation and interaction with content creators?’, Addictive Behaviors Reports, 19, 100550. doi: 10.1016/j.abrep.2024.100550
Support and Further Help
If any part of this article has raised concerns for you or someone close to you, the following organisations offer free, confidential support. If you or someone else is in immediate danger, call 999 or go to your nearest A&E.
Crisis and emotional support
Samaritans offers round-the-clock support for anyone who is struggling to cope, 365 days a year.
Telephone 116 123 (free) · samaritans.org
Shout is a free, confidential text service for anyone in crisis, available 24 hours a day.
Text SHOUT to 85258 · giveusashout.org
CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) is a suicide prevention charity with a helpline for adults aged 18 and over, open from 5pm to midnight every day. Webchat and WhatsApp are also available.
Telephone 0800 58 58 58 · thecalmzone.net
Mind provides mental health information and signposting in England and Wales.
Telephone 0300 123 3393 · mind.org.uk
NHS 111 offers urgent mental health support across England.
Telephone 111 and select option 2
Pornography use and compulsive sexual behaviour
NHS: Addiction support gives guidance on recognising when a behaviour has become harmful, and on speaking to your GP about local treatment.
nhs.uk/live-well/addiction-support
The CUBE Clinic (Changing Unwanted BEhaviour) is an NHS service run by Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust. It offers eligible UCL students free, confidential psychological therapy for problems with pornography, gaming, gambling, alcohol or drugs.
cnwl.cube@nhs.net · clubdrugclinic.cnwl.nhs.uk/cube-clinic
ATSAC (Association for the Treatment of Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity) keeps a directory of UK therapists, treatment centres and support groups for compulsive sexual behaviour.
atsac.org.uk
Bereavement
Cruse Bereavement Support provides support for anyone grieving the death of someone close to them.
Telephone 0808 808 1677 · cruse.org.uk
Money and debt
StepChange Debt Charity offers free, impartial debt advice and solutions.
Telephone 0800 138 1111 · stepchange.org
National Debtline offers free, confidential debt advice by telephone and online.
Telephone 0808 808 4000 · nationaldebtline.org
Citizens Advice offers free advice on debt, money and consumer rights.
Telephone 0800 144 8848 (England) or 0800 702 2020 (Wales) · citizensadvice.org.uk
MoneyHelper is a free, government-backed money guidance service from the Money and Pensions Service.
moneyhelper.org.uk