Futures At Stake: Youth, Gambling, And Society

5 Youth-Gambling Treatment Issues

Chapter Five Youth-Gambling Treatment Issues Sirgay Sanger Introduction Gambling touches on every aspect of personality, relationship, and impulse. Thus, the techniques used to treat adolescents who gamble may resemble the psychotherapy of all youngsters. This chapter will focus on a helpful core of essential skills and concepts that practitioners and administrators can use to influence the young personality with this addiction. It is assumed that professionals who treat this population have a foundation in the following underlying clinical skills and standards : interviewing techniques, motivating family support of therapy, structuring and limit setting within the therapeutic relationship, confidentiality, gathering information from school and camp, insisting on abstinence, and recommending groups and Gamblers Anonymous attendance (see Gupta & Derevensky, 2000). Professionals should be familiar with such developmental issues of adolescence and pre-adolescence as consolidation of morality and ethics, resolution of ambivalent thinking, relinquishment of magical thinking, and mastery of oppositional (contrarian) posturing. Other global achievements to be considered are the ability to grieve for real and imagined childhood pleasures, to set realistic goals, to balance personal and social demands, to transcend shame, and to have a sufficiently firm identity allowing empathy and love. A full discussion of developmental issues is available in standard texts on adolescence (Bird, 1995; Caplan & Lebovici, 1969; Holmes, 1964; Pearson, 1992). Obviously, adolescents have a lot on their plates. However, what is often left out of the picture is that their protection by family and society enables them to take risks in searching out, experimenting with, and experiencing the sensations and pleasures of life. Given the influence of the media, advertising, and group fashion, as well as the “worship” of idealized young bodies and sports, adolescents often feel impelled and entitled to have as much fun and freedom as possible. Measuring themselves against such aspirations, they may suffer from feelings of loneliness, inadequacy, and desperation. They may feel bored or may wish to challenge themselves to determine what levels of excitement are suitable. How far can one go before it gets scary? When does the bright side of danger darken? Nearly all adolescents think they know more than they do. Furthermore, they want to make their own mistakes and do not welcome correction. They pretend they can defy the laws of chance and influence any risk they encounter. This is a temporary attitude, but it is one that persists in those who go on to gamble (Derevensky, Gupta, & Cioppa, 1996). The Attraction of Quick Solutions and the Path to Gambling Adolescents are primed for immediate impulse gratification and to perpetuate positive arousal and thrill (Apter, 1992). They cannot bear the experience of anhedonia (lack of pleasure in acts that are usually pleasurable). Privileged youngsters from intact families are susceptible to these motives. Marginalized teenagers—dysfunctionally parented, poor, undereducated, and abused (with nutritional and neurophysiological early life stress)—are even more vulnerable; their intolerance of frustration is even greater. Immediate gratification is seen in alcohol and drug use, fast driving, promiscuity, pranks, stealing, and gambling. It can also be a motivator for turning toward the productive pursuits of art and music, the history of ideas, athletics, dramatics, explorations , and physical challenges. Which avenues youngsters may take are determined by their own characters, as well as their teachers, coaches, and friends. Are healthy opportunities or unhealthy gratifications available? Often when there is urgency to the unpleasure, the path of gratification is to toy with one’s own thinking patterns, to unlink cause and effect, idea and its felt component. In general, adolescents poorly identify the boundary between playing and serious life issues, ignoring consequences in order to pursue instant relief and positive gratifications. The therapy of gambling youths must address this conscious dismantling of maturity . Clarification and interpretation such as, “I needn’t tell you what you already know, do I?” are needed. Developmentally, adolescence is the era when the mind “comes together,” knits an identity, solidifies life purposes, and learns how to maintain states of calm and consistency. What experiment could be more sensational (and wanton) than to mishandle the mind, to play with one’s contemplative self, and to allow dissociation (uncoupling) to flourish? One comes to avoid relating present rational, logical experiences with their relevant patterns of past history. In essence, it is a process that allows one to suspend effective intelligence, to be negligent, to unthink , to allow irrationality and unmodulated impulses to prevail. This is a process that makes the adolescent appear...