Background: While the concept of internet addiction has captured the public ‘s imagination, the validity of the concept with the scientific community remains in doubt. One reason for this is the changing ways in which people access the internet. However, this situation is not unique to Internet Addiction. In particular, the increasing accessibility of the internet has meant people are able to gamble via the internet, through their smartphones or computers. There is thus uncertainty regarding the degree of overlap this may have with pre-existing forms of gambling, or with the original concept of ‘Internet Addiction’.
Aim: To determine whether problem gamblers that gamble using the internet, would differ from problem gamblers that do not.
Design; Cross-sectional study
Participants: 200 problem gamblers that were new referrals to the National Problem Gambling Clinic, London.
Measurements: We collected questionnaire measures of addiction severity and psychological morbidity including the PGSI, PHQ-9, GAD-7, IAT, UCLA-Scale, and LSNS-18. Participants were divided into three groups based upon whether they gambled online exclusively, partially, or not at all. We compared results in each of the questionnaire scores between the three groups using standard statistical difference tests.
Findings and Conclusion: We will present the preliminary results of our study at the conference. The results provide comparisons between two behavioural addictions that have unclear diagnostic boundaries, helping to inform the debate on their classification with much-needed data on what distinguishes them from the other, in one subgroup of the clinical population.
Co-Authors
Dr Marcus PJ Tan (Academic Clinical Fellow in Psychiatry)1,2 Drs Neil Smith, Andrew Bayston and Cindy Caraguel (clinical psychologists)2 Sophie Gaucheron Ward (medical student)2 Dr Henrietta Bowden-Jones (project supervisor)2 Affiliations Key: 1:
Conflicts of interest:
No conflict of interest.
