pathological gambling

Save the date and register today for the latest NCRG Webinar Series session on September 19! Wendy S. Slutske, Ph.D., 2011 NCRG Scientific Achievement Award winner and professor at the University of Missouri – Columbia, is leading the upcoming training, titled “Path to Recovery: Is Controlled Gambling Possible for Pathological Gamblers?” The webinar will be held on Wednesday, September 19, 2012 from 2 to 3 p.m. EST. The session is free to attend, participants will earn one CEU and registration is now open on the NCRG’s website.

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has proposed new criteria for a diagnosis of pathological gambling (PG) in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, slated for publication in 2013.  As reported in Issues and Insights and discussed at the 2010 NCRG Conference on Gambling and Addiction, the proposed revisions included moving PG from the impulse control category into a new classification, “addiction and related disorders.” It also proposes dropping illegal acts from the 10 criteria and possibly reducing the number of criteria needed for a diagnosis from five to four. A new review article by Howard J. Shaffer and Ryan Martin in the 2011 Annual Review of Clinical Psychology (Shaffer & Martin, 2011) provides a critical review of these recommendations.

The National Center for Responsible Gaming (NCRG) recently announced it awarded $380,466 in project grants in 2010 for five new research projects on topics ranging from a laboratory simulation of Internet gambling to an intervention for college students at risk for developing gambling problems. The recipients of these grants are investigators based at the University of Florida, Duke University, Southern Illinois State University, University of Missouri and University of Minnesota.

One way to measure the success of a research study is to calculate its influence on the field. The Web of Science is an online index of peer-reviewed publications that monitors the number of times a particular article is cited in other publications. A count of how many times a paper is referenced can be used as a rough estimation of the impact of a study on the field, although it is not a measure of quality.

Defining and categorizing disordered gambling will be one of the featured topics at the 11^th annual NCRG Conference on Gambling and Addiction this November. In a presentation titled “Conceptualizing Problem Gambling: Cautionary Lessons from the Over-Pathologization of Depression and Substance Use,” Jerome C. Wakefield, DSW, PhD , a professor at New York University School of Medicine, will critique what he sees as psychiatry’s failure to draw adequate distinctions between disordered behavior, eccentric or unconventional behavior, and normal responses to stress (Wakefield, 2010).

Dr. Wakefield’s presentation will be a counterpoint to a preceding conference session focused on the proposed changes to pathological gambling in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) (American Psychiatric Association, 2010). The DSM is the handbook of mental disorders in the United States, used daily by health care providers, researchers, insurance companies and government agencies.