BACKGROUND Gambling disorders affect about one percent of adults. Effective treatments are available but only a small proportion of affected individuals will choose to attend formal treatment. As a result, self-directed treatments have also been developed and found effective. Self-directed treatments provide individuals with information and support to initiate a recovery program without attendi...

Pathological gambling is a psychiatric disorder that has considerable public-health implications. Promising treatments for pathological gambling have been identified. However, most treatment research is limited by methodological problems that preclude drawing conclusions about treatment efficacy. We explore the empirical evidence for some currently practiced treatments for pathological gambling...

While a growing body of evidence suggests health-related behaviors, such as problem and pathological gambling, are affected by multiple levels of influence, gambling studies using an ecological approach have not been documented. This dissertation work, that contains three studies, contributes to fill such research gap by examining gamblers’ behaviors in formal treatment programs using an ecolog...

BACKGROUND Severe problem gambling is most often related to income producing offences such as larceny and embezzlement. In addition, the high rate of relapse to gambling problems and the link between gambling debts and crime have clinical, forensic and penitentiary implications. Considering the data from the literature presented here I decided to form and empirically verify a hypothesis that in...

OBJECTIVE There are few published studies on the comorbidity of psychosis and problem gambling. This paper provides estimates of the prevalence and clinical correlates of problem gambling in a representative sample of people with psychotic disorders. METHOD The second Australian national survey of psychosis was undertaken in 2010 and included adults (18-64 years) attending mental health servi...

Pathological gamblers who drink when gambling (n=158; 77% men; mean age=36.0 years) completed the Inventory of Gambling Situations (IGS) and gambling and drinking criterion measures. Principal components analysis on the IGS subscales revealed negative (e.g., Unpleasant Emotions) and positive (e.g., Pleasant Emotions) gambling situation factors. Subjecting IGS factor scores to cluster analysis r...

OBJECTIVES We examine the dynamics of gambling among young people aged 16-24 years, how prevalence rates of at-risk gambling and problem gambling change as adolescents enter young adulthood, and prevention and control strategies. METHODS A simple epidemiological model is created using ordinary nonlinear differential equations, and a threshold condition that spreads gambling is identified thro...

Background and aims Public stigma diminishes the health of stigmatized populations, so it is critical to understand how and why stigma occurs to inform stigma reduction measures. This study aimed to examine stigmatizing attitudes held toward people experiencing problem gambling, to examine whether specific elements co-occur to create this public stigma, and to model explanatory variables of thi...

OBJECTIVES To describe the epidemiology of gambling problems among youth aged 15 to 24 years in Canada and to examine whether these gambling prevalence patterns differ by sex and (or) by geographic region. METHOD We used data from The Canadian Community Health Survey: Mental Health and Well-Being. Gambling problems were determined according to the Canadian Problem Gambling Index. All prevalen...

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY To develop a grounded theory on how older adults, who may not have previously experienced gambling issues, come to develop gambling problems in later life. DESIGN AND METHODS Through semistructured in-depth interviews with 31 adults aged 56-85, routes that led the current sample of older adults to develop late-life gambling problems were identified and mapped into coheren...