Responsible gambling

If you would like to understand your behaviour towards gambling, please answer “yes” or “no” to the following self-assessment questions:

Do you try to control, interrupt or stop gambling?

Have you ever gambled more money than you intended?

Do you often find yourself thinking about past gambling experiences, planning the next time you will gamble, and/or considering ways to obtain money to gamble?

Does attempting to interrupt or stop gambling make you feel restless or irritable?

Do you gamble to escape from a problem? When you lose money gambling, do you go back to gambling to try to recover the losses?

Do you think you may have a gambling problem?

Do you finance your gambling activity through family money, loans, forgery, fraud or theft?

Have you ever missed work or school due to gambling?

Have you ever sought help from someone for financial problems caused by gambling?

If you have answered yes to some of these questions, you should consider whether gambling has stopped being a leisure activity and is becoming a problem.

Gambling games are as old as humanity itself, and all civilisations and cultures, to a greater or lesser extent, have practised some form of betting, chance, or wagering throughout history.

For the vast majority of people, games have been (and continue to be) a fun leisure activity and a way of social interaction; however, for a small group of individuals, gambling becomes a problem as a result of excessive use, which may lead to a progressive behavioural disorder. In fact, the World Health Organization included this disorder – pathological gambling – in its International Classification of Diseases in 1992.

According to this organisation, pathological gambling is a disorder characterised by the “presence of frequent and repeated episodes of participation in gambling activities, which dominate the patient’s life to the detriment of their social, occupational, material and family values and obligations. This behaviour persists and often increases despite its adverse social consequences, such as loss of personal fortune, deterioration of family relationships, and critical personal situations.”

According to estimates made by various researchers, pathological gambling affects around two per cent of the population, while, for example, 5.5 per cent of the adult population in Spain has alcohol-related problems.