PubMed Health⌕ Search
Home/Archive/PubMed

PubMed · 1525908

[Gambling passion].

J Vacek
View original source ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Among the populations of advanced western countries during recent decades the number of people with the passion for gambling is increasing. A similar trend may be soon foreseen in Czechoslovakia. The author summarizes contemporary views on the passion for gambling and informs also on forensic psychiatric aspects of this so far not generally accepted diagnostic category leading often to criminal offences.

Explore related subjects

Disruptive, Impulse Control, and Conduct DisordersGamblingHumansEnglish AbstractJournal Article

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

J Vacek. 1992. [Gambling passion].. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1525908/

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related citations

PubMed2006

A comment on the utility of prevalence estimates of pathological gambling.

The case is presented that researchers interested in policy aimed at treating the pathological gambler need to shift focus to improving the utility of prevalence estimates. It is argued that researchers supplement prevalence estimates with practical and well-defined measures of severity and other predictors and correlates of help-seeking. The dimension of severity is emphasized as one means of providing estimates that are relevant to policy makers when placed in the context of additional measures that improve their meaning and utility. Estimates may then be partitioned along these dimensions to ascertain the proportion of gamblers most likely to need or seek treatment for gambling-related disorders. The recommendations provided are subject to a number of possible objections and are presented in the interest of stimulating further discussion such as the distinction between symptom assessment and the measurement of severity.

Disruptive, Impulse Control, and Conduct Disorders↗
PubMed2006

Machines, medication, modulation: circuits of dependency and self-care in Las Vegas.

The intensive entertainment infrastructure of Las Vegas is overlaid with a robust therapeutic network for those who become addicted to its technologies. Although the objectives of gambling machines and addiction therapeutics are seemingly at odds--the first work to encourage play, the second to stop it--both gear their interventions around a model of the self as a continuum of behavioral potentials that can be externally modulated. For compulsive gamblers implicated in this circuit of modulation, pharmaceutical drugs that have been prescribed to dampen cravings for machine play sometimes function as intensifiers of its effects. Caught in an intractable play between technologies of harm and technologies of care, recovering gambling addicts are challenged to assemble a technical array through which they can maintain balance; health itself, for these individuals, becomes a state of managed dependency. This essay explores the shifting terms and changing stakes of subjectivity and health in the contemporary United States by way of ethnographic research on compulsive gamblers who live and work in Las Vegas. The analysis draws on interviews with gamblers as well as on observations in local self-help groups, directed group therapy sessions, and chat rooms of Internet recovery Web sites.

Disruptive, Impulse Control, and Conduct Disorders↗