The 22nd Conference on Gambling and Addiction will feature a series of webinars. Attendance is free but advance registration is required. Attendees will earn 1.5 continuing education hours. 

Please note continuing education hours are only available to participants of the live webinar and not available for viewing recorded sessions.

Tuesday, September 21, 2021

2-3:30 p.m. EDT

Who's Responsible for Responsible Gambling?

Speaker: Heather Gray, PhD

Academics, gambling regulators, and the gambling industry increasingly espouse a shared responsibility view of preventing gambling harm. This view considers individual gamblers and external stakeholders, such as casino employees, to be jointly responsible for minimizing gambling harm. But do individual gamblers share this view? This presentation will review three years of cross-sectional surveys with participants sampled from the (MGM) MLife customer loyalty program database. In the most recent survey, fielded in January 2020 with 4,336 MLife subscribers, we observed that most participants only held individual gamblers responsible for helping prevent gambling harm. Put another way, most participants held a purely internal responsibility viewpoint. However, those who screened positive on the Brief Biosocial Gambling Screen (BBGS) were more likely than those who screened negative to hold a shared responsibility viewpoint, and holding a diffuse sense of responsibility for minimizing gambling harm predicted BBGS status over and above traditional individual-level risk factors. These findings echo the previous two years of survey findings with largely non-overlapping samples. Additionally, for the first time, we observed that those who screened positive on the BBGS were more likely than their counterparts to deny personal responsibility for minimizing gambling harm to individual gamblers; that is, they were more likely to hold a purely external responsibility viewpoint. I will discuss implications of these findings for health promotion and best practices for message design in responsible gambling programs.

Heather M. Gray, PhD is director of academic affairs at the Division on Addiction, Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital and an Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She has collaborated with her Division colleagues to study the development of, and recovery from, addictive disorders. In particular, she has studied how social networks and personal identities relate to alcohol and other drug use behavior. She has completed program evaluation to document how people change their lives after completing substance use disorder and wellness interventions. In collaboration with Internet and land-based gambling operators in the United States and internationally, Dr. Gray has studied how people gamble and respond to interventions designed to promote responsible gambling. She and her colleagues have secured grant funding from federal, state, and private foundation sources. Through these funds, she has developed a record that includes nearly 40 peer-reviewed publications, as well as numerous book chapters and technical reports.

Learning Objectives:

• Describe the "internal responsibility," "shared responsibility," and "external responsibility" frameworks for minimizing gambling-related harm. 

• Describe the relationship between problem gambling (operationalized as scoring positive on a brief screen) and views about responsibility for minimizing gambling-related harm. 

Thursday, October 28, 2021

2-3:30 p.m. EDT

Loss Chasing in Gambling Disorder: Clinical, Behavioral, and Data Science Perspectives

Speaker: Luke Clark, PhD,  University of British Columbia

Loss chasing is a diagnostic item for Gambling Disorder and is present in many screening instruments for problem gambling. It is often discussed as a defining feature for differentiating disordered gambling from recreational gambling. But loss chasing can also be expressed in many ways, both within and between gambling episodes, and this creates an obstacle for understanding the ‘centrality’ of loss chasing. This talk will summarize three lines of research characterizing loss chasing on laboratory tasks, in authentic slot machines, and in online behavioral tracking data, in order to better establish the psychological underpinnings of this symptom. 

Learning objectives:

• To understand current research on the clinical status of loss chasing as a key feature of disordered gambling

• To consider how loss chasing can be expressed behaviorally in a number of different ways, both within and between sessions

• To understand the importance of loss chasing as one of the few features of disordered gambling that can be detected in behavioral tracking data

Registration:  https://reedexpo.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_dV4ltjkhTKaijYqSVHEbtw

Wednesday, August 18, 2021

2-3:30 p.m. EDT

Pharmacotherapy Treatment of Gambling Disorder

Speaker: Marc N. Potenza, MD, PhD, Yale University School of Medicine

Gambling disorder, previously termed pathological gambling, has been recognized as a formal disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual since 1980.  Currently, behavioral therapies and self-help groups like Gamblers Anonymous are the main treatment/intervention approaches utilized. While multiple medications have been tested in clinical trials for their efficacy and tolerability in the treatment of gambling disorder, no drug has an FDA indication for treating the condition. Data suggest that the vast majority of individuals with gambling disorder (more than 95%) have one or more co-occurring psychiatric disorder.  As such, in clinical practice, selection of the most appropriate medication for treating individuals may be guided by co-occurring disorders. Data suggest that targeting these co-occurring disorders may bring benefits in both the co-occurring and gambling domains. In this webinar, a current understanding of the data supporting the use of medications in the treatment of people with gambling disorder will be presented.

Learning objectives:

• Appreciate the variety and complexities of co-occurring gambling and other psychiatric disorders.

• Understand the evidence base for the use of medications in the treatment of people with gambling disorder given the frequently co-occurring psychiatric conditions.

• Learn how different classes of medications (e.g., opioid receptor antagonists, mood stabilizers, serotonin reuptake inhibitors) and nutraceuticals (e.g., n-acetyl cysteine) may hold promise in the treatment of people with gambling disorder, particularly those with co-occurring disorders.

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