Lori Brotto

Lori Anne Brotto (born 1975) is a Canadian psychologist best known for her work on female sexual arousal disorder (FSAD). She was the youngest member appointed to the committees for the revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).

In 1993, Brotto graduated Johnston Heights High School in Surrey, British Columbia. Brotto attended the University of British Columbia, earning a biopsychology B.S. in 1997, a M.A. in 1999, and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 2003. In 2003, she completed a one-year internship in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Washington, followed by a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship in Reproductive and Sexual Medicine. Brotto was licensed as a Psychologist in the Province of British Columbia in 2005 and has held a position in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of British Columbia since 2005.

Brotto is a member of the International Academy of Sex Research, the International Society for the Study of Women's Sexual Health, the Society for Sex Therapy and Research, the Canadian Sex Research Forum, and the Canadian Psychological Association. She is an Associate Editor for the Archives of Sexual Behavior, on the editorial board for Sexual and Relationship Therapy, and a consulting editor for the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy.

Brotto specializes in sexual issues for women during and after treatment for gynecological cancer, saying that "50% to almost 100% of women following gynaecological cancer do report some degree of sexual impairment depending on the kind of cancer treatment they've had." In 2005 Brotto launched North America's first study to explore a mindfulness-based treatment aimed at helping cancer survivors treated with radical hysterectomy regain their sexual health. To Brotto, the one defining feature of sexual dysfunction is the level of interference it causes. "If lack of desire or inability to reach orgasm interferes in a woman's life, distresses her, or creates a burden on her relationship with her partner, then it could do with some fixing. If it doesn't, then leave well enough alone." She coauthored two chapters on managing FSAD and low sexual desire in women in the 2009 publication Clinical Manual of Sexual Disorders edited by Richard Balon and Robert Taylor Segraves.

More recently, inspired by the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, Brotto has been involved in the subject of mindfulness meditation skills for women with problems of low sexual desire/loss of arousal, sexual distress associated with sexual abuse. She is also interested sexual difficulties associated with gynaecologic and colorectal cancers (men and women), and women with provoked vestibulodynia (genital pain)., and outcome research focused on psychological and mindfulness-based methods in the treatment of sexual dysfunction.