Background:There is no consensus on how to best define recovery in gambling disorder. This minimizes clinicians' abilities to apply optimal treatment goals and contributes to inconsistency in the use of outcome variables to evaluate interventions. Current understanding of recovery is largely based on professional opinion and theoretical models of gambling disorder. This study aimed to examine core features of recovery identified by service users with lived experiences.Methods: Thematic analysis was applied to qualitative data from 32 face-to-face interviews.Interviewees were at various stages of help-seeking for gambling problems mostly related to electronic gaming machines via self-exclusion and/or specialized gambling counseling.
Results: Recovery was perceived by the participants as a continuous process that encompasses periods of improvement and decline. Several key themes of recovery emerged; participants highlighted the importance of developing insight into the psychological and environmental processes that contribute to their gambling problem. Insight helped participants feel empowered to successfully manage their gambling urges and behavior. Recovery extended to building a meaningful life beyond gambling, which involved engagement in alternative activities and fostering strong social relationships. It included stabilization of personal finances and achieving general psychological health and wellbeing. Conclusions: Findings challenge acute symptom-focused models of recovery by broadening the definitional boundaries to include sustained improvements across multiple psychosocial dimensions. Greater emphasis should be given to service user-defined elements of recovery in treatment and research. The long-term perspective of the recovery process has implications for extending standard follow-up assessment intervals in gambling treatment studies. 3
Interventions to assist family communication about inherited cancer risk have the potential to improve family cancer outcomes. This review aimed to evaluate the efficacy of proband-mediated interventions employed within genetics clinics to increase disclosure of genetic risk to at-risk relatives. MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, PubMed and PsycINFO were searched for publications between 1990–2020. The quality of studies was assessed. From 5605 records reviewed, 9 studies (4 randomised control trials and 5 cohort studies) were included involving families with BRCA1, BRCA2 and Lynch syndrome. Intervention delivery modes included genetic counselling with additional telephone or in-person follow-up, letters, videos, and decision aids. The percentages of at-risk relatives informed by the proband about their risk ranged from 54.0% to 95.5% in the intervention or family-mediated comparison group. Of those who were informed, 24.4–60.0% contacted a genetics clinic and 22.8–76.2% had genetic testing after they were counselled at a genetics clinic. Significant differences between intervention and control group were reported on all three outcomes by one study, and with relatives contacting a genetics clinic by another study. The studies suggest but do not conclusively show, that tailored genetic counselling with additional follow-up can increase both the proportion of informed relatives and relatives who contact the genetics clinic. With the increase in germline testing, interventions are required to consider the family communication process and address post-disclosure variables (e.g., relative’s perceptions, emotional reactions) through engagement with probands and relatives to maximise the public health benefit of identifying inherited cancer risk in families.
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