Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The day is done. We're just getting started. The last show with David Cooper. I've always thought of gambling addiction as a personal vice, something you do as a lone wolf with a bad habit. But what if it spreads to the people close to you, your closest relationships? Sort of like gambling is a bit contagious. Well, that's what researchers found, and I'm joined by one of them.
His name is Dr. Richard Velleman, and he's a professor of mental health research at the University of Bath in the UK. Richard, welcome to the program. Hi, nice to be here. So this idea that gambling is kind of contagious to people close to you in your social circles, is this a new thing? Is this something that we didn't think happened before?
Well, it's very interesting. I mean, obviously I would say that, but it's very interesting because many other addictions have been seen as being things which are, I wouldn't use the word contagious.
Chapter 2: What does research say about the social spread of gambling addiction?
I think that's an interesting word to use.
That's the media oversimplification of the study. I get it.
Exactly. But yeah, I mean, people have known that alcohol problems run in families, that drug problems run in families, smoking runs in families. The biggest single... indicator to say you're going to be a smoker is whether your parents smoke rather than whether your friends smoke.
Even if your parents don't smoke and you get in with a group of friends in your teenage years and you start smoking, when you're in mid-20s or 30s, highly likely you will have stopped smoking. But if your parents were smokers, you're highly likely to carry on smoking. So smoking for some people is a phase, and for other people, it becomes a lifelong habit or even an addiction.
Alcohol has lots of similarities with that. Lots of other of the addictions do. We've indeed seen gambling as being different from that for lots of reasons. And lots of people have said, well, gambling is not really a true addiction as it doesn't involve taking in a substance like alcohol or drugs or tobacco.
What this research has shown is that gambling actually is much more like other addictions. Yes, it's an individual who does the activity, but actually there are huge impacts on other people in their social circle, particularly on the family, but also on friends.
But also, if you hang around with someone, if you're not a gambler, you hang around with someone who is a gambler, you're more likely to take up gambling. And if someone in your family, an important person in your family, one of your parents, your sibling is a gambler, you're more likely to take up gambling.
So that's the first big finding that actually, yes, to use your term, it's much more contagious than we'd thought. And it's much more like other addictions.
So walk me through how it can cluster in these close relationships. Like what would that actually look like? Would it be a parent subtly nudging a child to join them at the casino? Would it be shared habits? How does it sort of spread?
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Chapter 3: How does gambling addiction compare to other addictions?
The other bit is that actually... your family and friends in lots of contexts can be a protective factor as well. And what we discovered in this research was that friendships are not protected.
So if you've got a group of friends and some gamble and some don't, and you're close with some people and so on, having close friendships who aren't gamblers doesn't protect you from becoming a gambler if you've got a close friend who's a gambler. But having close relationships, close positive relationships in the family does protect you.
Even if there's a gambler in the family, let's say it's your brother, you're more likely not to be, quotes, infected by the gambling if you've got a good relationship with your sister or your other brother or your parents and so on. So close family relationships protect you even though you're more at risk by hanging around with gamblers, whether it's family and friends or whatever.
That's an interesting finding. In the friend groups scenario, is there something about having a group of, I don't know, gambling buddies that normalizes this behavior? Like if it's the social glue that holds even some of your friends together, does it just not feel like a red flag even if it is problem gambling?
To be honest, I don't know. I don't know why our results have shown that friendships, no matter how good or close your friendships are, they're not generally protective in the way that close family relationships are. Just send me a word about how we did this because people are going to think, how do they know all this stuff? Sure, yeah.
We actually did a longitudinal study, which meant that we went to people eight different times. So every six months, we did some very detailed interviewing work with people over a four-year period. So we could see the progression. We could see what the... who had good and bad relationships with different people at the time one, and then we had time two, time three, all the way up to time eight.
So we could actually measure whether one thing seemed to cause another thing or something else seemed to be protective for another thing. So we had this... A marvelous opportunity. And I should say, we did this research in Finland, and the lead researcher, my close colleague, Emi Kapila from the University of Tampere in Finland, was the lead researcher on this.
So this is research we did in Finland over the eight different periods.
I want to get one more question in here, Richard. Gambling, it doesn't involve a harmful substance like alcoholism or drug abuse. And so some people treat it like it's not that big a deal unless it, I suppose, gets so bad that someone can't pay their rent, can't pay their mortgage, loses their house.
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