Gambling Among Young People, 837 kB

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Introduction
In his book Det är som ett kärleksförhållande – spelmissbruk bland ungdomar (It Is Like a Love
Affair – Pathological Gambling in Young People), the writer Stig Helling describes how pathological
gambling develops in a young person and what it is that distinguishes pathological gambling from
social gambling (55). Helling interviewed 33 young people, 18 of whom were problem or pathological
gamblers. Several of these young people were winners for periods of time, or perceived themselves as
winners, but all were losers in the long term, both as gamblers as well as socially and psychologically.
The young pathological gamblers described how they went from gambling together with good
friends as a social activity to becoming withdrawn and gambling alone. Gambling alone enables you
to decide for yourself how long and for how much you are going to gamble and you are left in peace. One
young man described it as becoming “one” with the fruit machine: “it was almost like a love affair.”
Many of the pathological gamblers had trouble distinguishing between reality and “wishful thinking”
when they gambled. Despite them normally being rational and logical human beings, when
they gambled they may have thought in the following terms:
• It is not chance that determines the game but luck. There are lucky machines, lucky numbers,
lucky days and so one (magical thoughts).
• I can influence the outcome of the game thanks to my skill (or similar) (illusion of control).
• Dreaming about easy money, an easy life without worries.
Many of the gamblers gambled when they were in a difficult period in their lives, they gambled to forget
and to escape into “a protective cocoon”. In the long term it became a vicious circle; they gambled
because they felt down, they felt down because they gambled (and lost) and then they escaped even
more through their gambling.
For the pathological young gamblers, gambling was about trying to win money in desperation to
pay off gambling debts. When the debts instead kept on growing they gambled more and more and
many committed crimes in order to pay for their gambling. Some of them were already into crime,
while others started behaving criminally as a consequence of their gambling, and for them the thefts
and the fraud increased at the same pace as the gambling debts grew. They stole from their families,
embezzled money and some committed even more serious crimes, like burglaries or robberies. The
more time passed, the more serious the consequences on other areas of life, like school and work,
friends and spare time activities (55).
The prevalence of pathological gambling in young people
The studies on the prevalence of gambling problems/addiction in young people are the same as the
ones that were presented under the heading “How much do young people gamble?”, with a few exceptions
and additions. In these studies, the young people have usually been asked about both their
gambling habits and their addiction. This means that also here it is a matter of cross-sectional studies,
usually in the shape of a questionnaire, and in a very few cases telephone interviews. The studies
presented here have randomly selected the young people participating, which means that they are
sometime representative for an entire population, for example young people in Norway (the studies
have also been summarised in table form, see appendix 1).
international studies
Shaffer and Hall have compared a number of studies from the USA and Canada that have mapped out
the prevalence of pathological gambling in young people in different states during the 1980s and the
first half of the 1990s. In the studies included in the comparison, different tools were used, all of
which distinguished between young people who did not gamble or did not have a gambling problem,
those that had a gambling problem and those who seemed to be pathological gamblers. The review