Comment by superkuh
1 day ago
Gambling is not an addiction. It is "gambling disorder" and it was grandfathered into the DSM. It is explicitly not an addiction medically. Eating and shopping are two great examples not erronously grandfathered in, which committees repeated find are not addiction, but which those scammers love to profit off of.
My understanding was that self-professed gambling addicts — unlike casual gambers — were discovered to get the same shot of dopamine to their system when losing as the do when winning. Why would that not qualify as “medically addicted”? (IANA-Doctor)
So why do you think people continue to gamble, even after it has ruined their and their families lives and finances? Slot machine addicts will literally void their bladder rather than stop playing for 5 minutes to use the restroom.
Because people make poor choices and it's usually their own fault.
We used have words like "vice" and "sin" to describe these poor choices, but thanks to post-60s radical individualism, the only vocabulary for describing maladaptive behavior that remains of the language of medicine. Therefore, everything bad someone does is a "disease" for which he needs "therapy" or "treatment". We've utterly lost the capacity for describing deficiencies of the conscience.
Psychology and medicine have a bad habit of describing something, giving it a name, and then pretend it's also an explanation of the something. "Addiction" is one such thing. It's both a description of behavior and a (circular, deficient) explanation of behavior.
But then again, so is "vice" and "sin". You're not helping.
Why would many, many, many people choose to piss and shit themselves in public instead of stopping for a few minutes to use the restroom? Why would someone choose the push a button every 5 seconds to the point where it ruins their life?
Put it another way: why would gambling companies continue to develop gambling machines? Why not stop with the mechanical, one-armed-bandit of the early 1900s if what they do has no effect on people?
2 replies →
"Gambling Disorder" is in the disorder class "Substance-Related and Addictive Disorders" in DSM-5 though.
Many behaviors have been added and removed as "disorders" from the DSM as politics of the time demanded.
If this is true, why do GLP-1 drugs which are just hormones also shown to have an effect on gambling?