Prevalence of Problematic Gambling in South Australia: A Population Health Perspective

Abstract

This paper was designed for a public health readership, rather than for the traditional gambling research fraternity, in order that it might reach people working in the wider primary health care field who have an interest in the social, political, and philosophical implications of the emerging phenomenon of modern problematic gambling and gambling disorders in our community. In various iterations of standard prevalence studies designed to determine the number of people in defined populations who are adversely affected by gambling to the extent that they would register a DSM 5 diagnosis for gambling disorder, findings are consistent over time. That is, around 3% of the population is at severe or moderate risk of having a gambling disorder. Given that up to ten other individuals may be impacted adversely by the behaviour of each problem gambler in the community, and suffer the negative consequences of this affliction, the implications for society are clear. Gambling disorder, a preventable condition in essence, has a substantially negative impact on society and requires significant resources for remediation; resources that should rightly be drawn from the industry that profits from gambling and from governments that rely on the inexorably increasing revenue streams flowing from the expanding gambling industry. In contrast, however, resources flowing back to the afflicted in the community are sparse indeed, with South Australia’s Office for Problem Gambling, for example, managing an annual budget of around $5m to support people seeking help for their gambling problems. The challenge for service providers in this context, therefore, has been to achieve the best treatment outcome for each person seeking help for their gambling problem and at the lowest possible cost, hence the current search for efficiency and cost effectiveness in treatment programmes.