Family deception, hiding to be a gambler, gambling concern or the loss of personal relationships, work or education or labour opportunities are some of the unequivocal signs that alert to a gambling disorder. The professor of the University of Granada José María Salinas has developed in collaboration with the Federación Andaluza de Jugadores Rehabilitados (Andalusian Federation of Rehabilitated Gamblers) a diagnostic method to determine gambling addiction.
According to the professor of the department of Social Psychology and Methodology of the University of Granada, there are currently “more than half a million people addict to games of chance who need a treatment to give up this addiction that forces them to gamble in a persistent and progressive way, until they have end up with emotional dependence of gambling that affects in a negative way their personal, family and professional life”. A solution for this disorder is “to detect the disorder in time”, and therefore it is so important “the development of a good diagnostic method”, the professor says.
Addiction diagnosis
The project, which started in 1999, intends to carry out a questionnaire, whose answers allow professionals to determine the existence of dependence in the patient. In order to prepare questions properly, the team of scientists has based on the results of a previous study carried out on a sample of 64 gamblers in rehabilitation process comparing their answers with a sample of 140 individuals of the general population.
Among the symptoms pointed out by 80% of those surveyed, the main ones are family deception and the hiding of their gambler condition as key elements of a gambling disorder. The need of recovering their money after having lost it, family problems or the obsession for going on gambling are other of the features that those affected by a pathological gambling disorder point out as signs of the disease.
From these data, they developed the fifty questions of the diagnostic questionnaire, such as Do thoughts about gambling not allow you to concentrate on your work or tasks like reading or solving family?; when you are gambling, are you set on going on gambling until you win?; Have you ever felt guilty for gambling or for what happens to you when you are gambling?; do you gamble to forget or to endure your sad life? or do you think that the only way to solve your economic situation is having a stroke of luck in game?.
Assessment in the net
The questionnaire assesses dependence according to the following scoring: 0 Never, 1 Sometimes and 2 Very often, and has a reduced digital edition all the psychology professionals can access and benefit, after asking for permission, in the web address http://www.ugr.es/local/jsalinas to assess their patients´ addiction.
Although it is not the only questionnaire available to determine the pathological gambling disorder, Salinas says that it brings something the others can not bring as intense gambling is an addiction with the characteristics of drug addiction, with the la implication of the same recompense system of the pleasure a gambler experiences while gambling and is the yearning for that pleasure which provokes gambling addiction.
Precisely, the group of professors of the department of Social Psychology and Methodology of the University of Granada has set in motion a study to assess the features of the personality of pathological gamblers in order to prove that pathological gambling responds to the same addiction outline that the consumption of substances such as drugs. Although the results of this study will not be available until the end of September, the first data analysed point out that pathological gamblers do not show more impulsiveness than the general population but that their disorder is a consequence of an addiction situation comparable to that experienced with drugs.
Reference
Prof. José María Salinas
Dpt. Social Psychology and Methodology.
Tlfs. 958 24 62 76
E-mail. jsalinas@ugr.es
