Social Support is Associated with Gambling Treatment Outcomes in Pathological Gamblers

Abstract

Poor social support is a contributory factor in development of addictive disorders, but it has rarely been evaluated in pathological gamblers. This study examined social support in pathological gamblers and its relationship with treatment outcomes. Low baseline social support was associated with increased severity of gambling, family, and psychiatric problems and poorer post-treatment outcomes. Further, social support assessed post-treatment was significantly related to severity of gambling problems at the 12-month follow-up. These findings demonstrate that social support plays an important role in moderating outcomes, and enhancing social support may be an important aspect of effective gambling treatments.

Problem Gambling and the Youth-to-Adulthood Transition: Assessing Problem Gambling Severity Trajectories in a Sample of Young Adults

“…Hardoon et al 2004) and may also help foster recovery (Hodgins and el-Guebaly 2000;Petry and Weiss 2009), our analysis found no significant effects for perceived level of social support on either the initial level of problem gambling or its trajectory. In contrast, we did find partial evidence for the illusion of control effect on problem gambling-on one hand, the greater the illusion of control, the higher the initial level of problem gambling severity, on the other hand, illusion of control showed no effect on the rate of change.…”

Pathological gambling: understanding relapses and dropouts

“…In our study, patients who were single had a higher risk of relapse during the treatment period than those who were married/separated/divorced or widowed. Nonetheless, some authors report no differences [5,13] in the frequency of relapses according to the marital status and suggest that having any family member to rely on or even social support will increase the probability of remaining on therapy and obtaining better outcomes [32,33]. The amount of money invested in the game was also a predictor of early relapse.…”

Predictors of outcomes of psychological treatments for disordered gambling: A systematic review

“…These findings have implications for future research, whereby studies need to examine, not only pre-treatment predictors of long-term treatment outcomes, but also during-and post-treatment predictors. While not directly examined in this review, there are several studies that examine the influence of post-treatment client characteristics on follow-up treatment outcomes (Dowling, 2009;Petry & Weiss, 2009;Sander & Peters, 2009). Each of these studies found promising results consistent with the substance abuse literature, with post-treatment gambling frequency (Dowling, 2009), post-treatment social support (Petry & Weiss, 2009) and post-treatment psychological distress and quality of life (Sander & Peters, 2009) significantly associated with treatment outcomes at follow-up evaluations.…”