Willpower can stop gambling

David Hodgins

A phone call and a booklet full of practical advice can be enough to rescue many potential problem gamblers, new research shows.

Canadian researcher David Hodgins told a gambling conference in Auckland that about 40 per cent of people whose gambling reached the point of harming themselves or others recovered from their addictions by their own willpower.

He has designed a "minimal intervention" programme to help them and others whose gambling problems are moderate, rather than severe.

The programme is designed for people who are already motivated enough to seek help but are too busy, embarrassed or ashamed to go to a counsellor.

Instead, his research team sent people a workbook with practical tips, such as advising them to tell their partners or friends they were quitting gambling so they would have some support to keep to their vows.

At the same time, a counsellor rang each gambler to motivate them to deal with their problems.

"We asked people, what are your concerns about gambling? What do you like about it? What is not so good about it?" Dr Hodgins said.

"The assumption is that anyone trying to make a big behavioural change, certainly to change an addictive behaviour, is going to have a lot of mixed feelings about it. There is something they like about it. They need to resolve this ambivalence if they are going to be successful.

"We promoted self-advocacy, asking have you ever done this before? Have you ever stopped smoking or drinking? When you did that, how did you do it?

"They said, 'I told my wife; I told my friends.' We said, when you get the workbook that's one of the tips in there. So we did things to suggest that they could do it and to suggest things they could look at when they got the workbook."

The experiment was set up so that all the gamblers received the workbook but only half received the phone call as well.

Two years later, 62 per cent of those who received the workbook only had cut their gambling significantly. Among those who also received the phone call, the number jumped to 89 per cent.

Dr Hodgins is now running more experiments to test whether the effect could be increased further by "booster" phone calls over succeeding months.

New Zealand Gambling Helpline chief executive Krista Ferguson said her service already provided a workbook to follow up an initial phone call. She also provides a booklet for family members but said follow-up phone calls were less formal.

"We give ongoing support but we don't necessarily ask whether they are working through the workbook," she said.

She told a "think-tank" of gambling-help professionals the helpline received calls from a higher percentage of its population than any of 21 other helplines except for one in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia.

Ms Ferguson noted that governments in New Zealand and Nova Scotia had acknowledged that problem gambling was a health issue and needed to be dealt with.

"If the Government doesn't acknowledge there are problems, you are going to have more barriers to people coming forward for help," she said.

"Where you have Government policy acknowledging that gambling harms, it breaks down the barrier for people to come forward."