Addiction Research & Therapy

Biography

Biography: Lemarie Linda

Abstract

For industry officials and gambling defenders, gambling is an effective way to create jobs and to raise revenue without raising taxes. However, these benefits come with a hefty social and economic price tag. The growing of legalized gambling brings an increase in the number of addicted gamblers with what it all means: higher indebtedness and bankruptcy rates as well as increased divorces, suicides, and gambling-related crimes. Pathological gambling is recognized as an impulse disorder since 1980 (DSM IV – American Psychiatric Association, 1994). The reasons why gamblers become addicted are complex. There is some research-based evidence that gamblers are influenced in part by their social and physical environment. However, non-profit organizations, public agencies, and researchers are focusing their attention on another possible cause of problem gambling development, which is gambling advertising. In response to these accusations, some gambling companies have developed their own program of prevention designed to educate people, especially gamblers, about the harmful effects of heavy gambling. The main goals of this presentation will be first to review the literature on pathological gambling and to expose the different categories of pathological gamblers, second to explain how messages sent by the gambling industry through gambling advertising and marketing impact on these different types of pathological gamblers and, third to open the discussion on anti-gambling programs developed by the gambling industry. Are they effective? Do they need to be encouraged or stopped? What kind of problem can emerge from these individual initiatives? The final discussion will enlarge the results to others types of behavioral addictions and especially food addiction.