hello this is dr. Grande today the question is what is gambling disorder now gambling disorder is a mental health disorder and sometimes it's thought of it as a process addiction and it's characterized by persistent and recurrent problematic gambling that's not better explained by mania what are some of the symptoms associated with gambling disorder so we see with gambling disorder is significant distress we see that something can be irritable a lot of times they need an increasing amount of money to gamble they've tried to stop in the past but been unsuccessful they seem preoccupied with gambling they tend to gamble more when they're under stress somebody with this disorder can chase losses meaning they lose money gambling and they continually try to recapture that lost money they just keep chasing those losses sometimes we see lying losing jobs losing other opportunities and relationships as part of what happens when somebody has gambling disorder how common is this disorder and who does it affect so we believe gambling disorder affects about 1 percent of the population and it affects men at a rate 3 times higher than women gambling disorder is the only one listed in the DSM not related to drugs or alcohol how can you be addicted to a behavior and are there any other disorders similar to this that's a great set of questions so we would consider gambling disorder to be a process addiction it's also called a behavioral addiction and you can think about it as an addiction to a process or behavior instead of a substance now currently in the DSM as you mentioned it's the only disorder gambling disorder is the only disorder that we could call a process addiction the other potential disorders aren't there but we do see other behaviors that we can refer to as process addictions even though we don't have an official mental health disorder at this time for example we see the same pattern of behavior the one we see with gambling disorder sometimes with eating with sexual activity with spending and how much time somebody spends on the Internet are there any known causes for the gambling specifically we're not really sure about causes for gambling disorder there are a number of theories one theory is that gambling creates a reinforcement schedule so when somebody Gamble's if they keep gambling long enough of course they're going to win and this motivates them to keep trying that even though most of the time they're losing or they're losing more money than they're making but this doesn't really hold up too well in research do we find there's potentially other causes and one popular theory right now is it actually trauma leads to gambling disorder and we see with the adverse childhood experiences scale with aces studies this leads us to believe that trauma or adverse experiences in childhood could be causal could contribute to the development of gambling disorder how can this disorder be treated so there are a number of ways to treat gambling disorder oftentimes again we think of this as a process addiction so the same treatments you see for Gami disorder would be used with other process addictions and with substance use disorders so cognitive behavioral therapy would be popular and group therapy would be popular for gambling disorder