Currently, the American Psychiatric Association categorizes gambling addictions separately from substance abuse disorders, like cocaine or heroin addictions. This May, however, the association is set to release a revision of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the standard U.S. classification of mental health disorders). Dr. Marc Potenza, GRD ‘93, MED ’94, expects that in the revised version of the manual, gambling addictions will be grouped in the same category as substance abuse disorders.
The upshot is that an addiction to gambling is indeed more or less akin to an addiction to cocaine. This switch in classification is in large part due to work by Potenza and his team here at Yale, work that has earned him more than a few accolades. On Mar. 14, the National Center for Responsible Gaming awarded Yale a three-year, $402,500 grant to continue researching gambling. “We are honored to award one of the three-year NCRG Center of Excellence in Gambling Research to Yale University’s Dr. Marc Potenza and his research team,” Christine Reilly, the senior research director for the NCRG, said. “His research has really helped us to understand the neurobiology of gambling addiction,” commented Keith Whyte, the executive director of the NCPG.
Potenza teaches both psychiatry and neurobiology here at Yale and talks about gambling in decidedly antiseptic, scientific terms. “Gambling,” he said in an interview, “particularly the problematic forms like pathological gambling, does constitute a significant psychiatric, or mental health, condition.”
Potenza is, by all accounts, one of the world’s most important voices on this subject. “He’s always been right at the forefront,” Cheryl Lacadie, a research support specialist at the Yale Medical School who has worked with Potenza for 15 years, said.
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Yet the change in classification notwithstanding, pathological gambling is nothing new. Potenza cited a fable from the Mahabharata, the ancient Indian text written in Sanskrit, in which a prince gambles away his fortune and eventually gambles his wife into servitude on a game of dice. “Nonetheless, most people gamble,” Potenza said, “and gamble without developing problems.”
Adolescents, especially college-age young adults, are at heightened risk to develop gambling disorders. “The inherent problem with young adults is that they’re used to gaming with video games, and they’re used to winning,” Cavenis said. “Then they get into a gambling situation and they don’t win and they don’t understand why they don’t win.” In gambling terms, “chasing” is when a gambler tries to recoup a set of losses through increased gambling. Young adults are especially susceptible to this temptation, Cavenis explained. “Once you start chasing your losses you can become an addictive gambler a lot faster,” he said.
Much of Potenza’s research has revolved around this issue of the vulnerability of adolescents to gambling disorders. Research he conducted last fall, for example, found that adolescents who were given scratch lottery tickets as children were more likely to begin gambling earlier in life. According to the report, this early gambling may be a risk factor for more severe gambling disorders later in life.
Part of an adolescent’s susceptibility to the development of a gambling disorder is derived from the normal process of growing up, Potenza explained. “Adolescents, as compared to children and adults, may be particularly prone to engage in risk taking behaviors, and part of developing into an adult may involve a certain amount of risk taking,” he said.
But some observers also blame American culture for the problem, maintaining that the United States unduly promotes recreational gambling. “We’ve always been a nation of gamblers,” Whyte said. “Some of our earliest forefathers were predisposed to take risks. We embrace risk, and that’s great in business, but this hasn’t always been a nation where it’s been so heavily government endorsed.” He pointed to lottery advertisements as examples of the U.S. government endorsing a potentially addictive—and harmful—recreation. “The state of Connecticut is telling you to play the lottery, but you would never see Connecticut put up a billboard saying to smoke more Luckies.”
With addictive gambling on track to be classified as a mental health disorder, there’s no safe bet on what the future of gambling culture and gambling disorders holds. In the meantime, more than eight million March Madness brackets—many of which, it’s safe to assume, are linked to betting pools—were submitted to ESPN this month.