Gambling as a diagnosis

Forensic psychiatrists will deal with gambling addicts

The creative passion of the Russian government, creating and launching national projects and federal targeted programs to the masses, seems to have reached the conscious strata of society. The director of the Scientific Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry named after Serbsky announced yesterday the creation of her program to combat gambling addiction. “Currently, practically no one is studying the issues of gambling addiction in Russia, and patients cannot receive qualified help. I hope that in our center the working group will eventually turn into an independent branch, and then a network of such branches will appear in all regions of Russia,” said Tatyana Dmitrieva.

Psychiatrists believe that society should not underestimate the risk of gambling addiction. In their opinion, games, or rather the inability to break away from them, lead to social problems: a person loses his job, experiences problems in his family, and his familiar world collapses. Over the past few years, 500 people suffering from gambling addiction have contacted the specialists of the Serbsky Center. Mostly we are talking about people squandering money in slot machines and cards. But, apparently, the people who turned to the specialists of the Serbsky Institute were already on the path to healing, since seeing and understanding the problem means half solving it. Tatyana Dmitrieva is more concerned about those who have not yet realized the danger of their lifestyle for themselves and others.

As is known, the predisposition to gambling addiction is inherent in the type of character and temperament of a person, and also depends on gender. “If this is a person who is carried away and is able to forget about everything in the world, then he will become a player more easily than anyone else,” Ms. Dmitrieva recalled. Men make up 68% of all gambling addicts in the world, and women make up 32%. Men start gambling at the age of 20, and women at 30. Recently, the proportion of older people who are passionate about gambling has been growing. “Elderly people who lose their pensions often go to hospitals to get food, and not at all because of any illness,” said the deputy director of the institute, Zurab Kekelidze.

Currently, Hong Kong leads the world in terms of the number of gambling addicts, with the USA and Canada in second place. There are no official statistics for Russia yet, but, according to Tatyana Dmitrieva, up to 5% of the Russian population are potential gambling addicts, “they will come to casinos and gaming tables.”

The concern of Russian doctors is also connected with the growing scale of the gambling business in Russia. Again, there is no official information about how much income the gambling business brings in in Russia. According to American analysts, it is about $4 billion a year and is growing rapidly. As the ex-president of the Russian association “World of Games” Dmitry Slobodkin admitted, from 2000 to 2005, budget revenues from taxes on gaming establishments increased from 500 million to 20 billion rubles.

Kirill VASILENKO