Psychological Distress in People with Persistent Genital Arousal Disorder/Genito-Pelvic Dysesthesia (PGAD/GPD): A Scoping Review

Persistent genital arousal disorder/genito-pelvic dysesthesia (PGAD/GPD) is a condition characterised by persistent, unwanted sensations of genital arousal that occur without subjective sexual desire. The condition has been associated with depression and suicidality, but no review has mapped the extent and nature of the evidence on psychological distress in people with PGAD/GPD. This scoping review therefore aims to map the existing evidence, identify gaps in the literature, and inform future research and clinical practice. Following JBI guidance and the PRISMA-ScR reporting guidelines, a systematic search was conducted in May 2026 across eight databases, supplemented by grey literature searching and bidirectional (forward and backward) citation searching. Sources were eligible if they reported primary empirical data on the experience of psychological distress in people of any sex or gender with PGAD/GPD, including under earlier names for the condition. All study designs were eligible, including case reports, qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods studies, theses and other grey literature, with no restriction on date, setting or country. Only English-language sources were included. Reviews, conference abstracts, sources in which PGAD/GPD data could not be separated from other conditions, and sources with too little data on distress were excluded. Extracted data were analysed using thematic analysis, following Braun and Clarke's (2006) approach, to map patterns in the experiences of psychological distress associated with PGAD/GPD. The review was informed by critical realism, which treats reported experiences of distress as a partial account of underlying mechanisms, such as stigma and healthcare responses, that may produce it. This allowed the findings to move beyond description and to identify factors that future research and clinical practice could address.