Pathological Gambling in Romania

The concept of addiction has been broadened in recent years to include appetitive behaviors judged to be excessive in some sense: excessive drinking, drug-taking, gambling, eating and sexuality. The main objective of this paper is to provide a cognitive behavioral counseling model for pathological gambling and, as a practical step, to analyze its efficiency after applying it on a group of 119 pathological gamblers who joined Responsible Gambling Program in Romania. Secondly, we aim to achieve the first systematic and comprehensive study regarding the psychological profile of the Romanian pathological gambler. The results show that Romanian pathological gamblers are mostly male (94.1% of the cases), aged between 17 and 61 with an average of 29.86; most of them present depressive and anxiety disorders and 44.5% of them presents at least one personality disorder. This book is a guiding manual for therapists and counselors treating clients with gambling addictions and it also supplies detailed information to help anyone understand gambling behaviors.