The course of disease of gambling addiction

The psychology divides the course of disease of gambling addiction idealtypically into three phases:

Phase 1

During the so-called winning phase, you gamble occasionally and increase your bets, especially when you have won some winnings. Over time, the frequency of your participation in gambling as well as your risk disposition increases before you enter the period of loss.

Phase 2

At this stage, you neglect your friends and family as well as your tasks at your workplace. They often think of gambling and raise a credit to continue to gamble. You start to hide your losses both in from yourself and aswell from your reference person by whitewashing your occasional winnings.

Phase 3

The third phase is a desperation phase and is characterized by first irregularities in debt clearing. Yout diverge yourself from friends and family even more than in the loss phase, so that you are socially isolated after some time.

You think almost exclusively of gambling and probably lose your job due to unreliability. Healthwise you suffer from a crisis of conscience because of gambling as well as insomnia. In addition, you are easily irritable and develop feelings of hatred against the gamblers who actually or supposedly win.

Gambling addiction develops slowly

The psychological phase classification of the gambling addiction represents a model, which depicts the actual addiction situation pretty well. However, the transition between the responsible gampling participation and the first addiciton phase can not be defined for a certainty. It also depends on the ratio of gambling bets and income.

Many addiction histories begin with the fact that at the beginning, non-addictive casual gamblers gain an unusually high win and erroneously assume that this success can be easily replicated. In the second and third phases of gambling addiction, the symptoms are clear.