When they step onto a casino floor and sit down to gamble, most people will do so from a place of psychological safety. We might win a little more than we expected, we might spend a little more than we expected, but the experience, generally, is one of entertainment-slash-fun.
For some people, however, that is absolutely not the case. Those find being on a casino floor and gambling to be anything but psychologically safe. They might describe themselves as having a dependency on gambling.
On the whole, the gambling industry knows that it’s important to set things up so protective interventions are available to players living with dependency. What this is like on the ground varies from operator to operator, but for someone like me, looking in from the outside, the shape of what the industry offers looks a bit strange.
It’s strange to me, because the general shape of that protection tends to look like: 1) Watchful waiting, 2) …” and 3) Self-exclusion. A huge lump is missing that should be making up stage 2 of that process.
No one wakes up in the morning and thinks, “You know what, from today and for the rest of my life, I’m going to be dependent on: alcohol, nicotine, gambling, sex, social media, etc.” But the solutions offered by the gambling industry tend to be framed as this is the case. It’s missing an understanding of the decline.
There is a genesis to dependency and a fairly well-agreed path to how it happens. One version goes all the way back to early childhood and the family of origin and sees something happen to the individual that creates a feature in their psychology on which vulnerability to developing a dependency can hook and form. At first, they might gamble a normal and safe way, but eventually the more-safe-than-not-safe activities give way to more not safe than safe. For example, they might end up borrowing money to gamble more or need to gamble larger amounts to get the same sense of satisfaction, and so on.
Eventually, for some players, this gets so bad that it starts to express itself as significant harm, damaging the person’s relationship with others, job, life, etc. In other words, the gambling dependency takes over and now that person is in crisis.
At this point, although the industry calls it “exclusion,” what is more accurately described as “abstinence” absolutely makes sense. We see this with every other dependency. When the impact of the activity gets so bad, in order to protect themselves, the player has to go through a complete cessation of the activity, usually forever.
The industry, and not just in Las Vegas and the U.S., but globally, almost always does a good job of supporting self-exclusion.
The problem with exclusion is that by the time the player gets there, things are already awful for them and that has been the case for an extremely long time. An individual looking at total abstinence from an activity that they are living with a dependency on is operating from a place of 100% self-preservation. Abstinence is a measure born of desperation.
What the industry is missing are any tools that can be deployed at any point on the declining path from vulnerable, but generally OK, to impossible to bear.
It’s a classic argument of prevention is better than cure. (Abstinence is not a “cure” for dependency, but I think this is a useful way of framing the work to be done.)
Coming back to the 1) vulnerable, 2) …, 3) exclusion flow that we met a moment ago, the logical step here is to think about what 2” actually looks like.
That’s way beyond the scope of this post and more than a bunch of research papers and even some textbooks. But we come up with something of a manifesto here and I think it’s something like this:
- There’s nothing wrong with gambling as a product. Some players are vulnerable to becoming dependent on gambling and that’s OK.
- The player almost certainly doesn’t know they’re on a path of decline. This makes it hard for either side to see that something is going wrong.
- The industry needs to be open to the idea of deploying solution-based interventions that work with the player’s emergent understanding of their living with dependency much much earlier in the process.
- Self-exclusion and abstinence need to be framed as a failure — more could be done earlier — rather than be looked at as a win (pun not intended).
