Spelreklam och spelberoende - Statens folkhälsoinstitut

12 spelreklam och spelberoende – en intervjustudie
applies to some people in the border zone between problem gambling and
pathological gambling. However, the influence of advertising is apparently
not large enough to turn a leisure gambler into a problem gambler, or a problem
gambler into a pathological gambler. The conclusion is that gambling
advertising to some extent worsens and sustains the gambling problems of
some individuals.
The study shows that many of those problem gamblers who have made a
decision to cut down on gambling or quit entirely are tempted by gambling
advertising. This has to a varying extent resulted in gambling. A person, who
otherwise copes well with temptations and impulses to gamble, will also resist
those from advertising. Such a person yields to temptation only when several
unfortunate circumstances combine. However, the person who is not very
successful in his or her intention to abstain from gambling is liable to give in
to many kinds of temptations to gamble, some of which may come from
advertising.
One of the participants in the study clearly remembered how advertising
provoked a relapse to gambling after five months of abstention. Two other
persons said that advertising might have contributed to relapse. Relapse
into gambling by pathological gamblers is a complex process – the result of
a lost inner struggle between the desire to gamble and the rational wish to
abstain – and it is therefore hard to tell if advertising in these and similar
individual cases has been a prerequisite for relapse. The person might have
relapsed even without being influenced by advertising, the relapse being
provoked by some other external or internal impulse. However, on a collective
level – i.e. the many thousand pathological gamblers in Sweden who
abstain from gambling – it is likely that some individuals receive impulses
to gamble from the ubiquitous advertising at unfortunate moments, when
their coping abilities are weakened, and relapse when they otherwise would
not have.
The study indicates that gambling problems are not caused by advertising,
but have other basic causes, mainly personality factors and the availability
of gambling in society. Factors that are identified in international academic
literature as being related to problem gambling are apparent among the
persons interviewed: a wish to escape from worries and anxiety, sensation
seeking, an acquired compulsory behaviour, irrational optimism about
winning, the idea of beating the odds through superior skill, and a social