Search

FreeLudo is an innovative project targeting the primary prevention of DSM-5 Gambling Disorder (GD), addressing children aged between 6 and 8 years attending Primary School. An innovative platform has been developed, which enables hybrid online and offline interaction and provides children with questionnaires aimed at better understanding the potential risk factors for the development of GD. Online interaction consists in providing questionnaires through a simple platform video game; after the video game, the platform also proposes social interaction among children by assigning them social challenges and activities. While providing an interactive user awareness on the risk of Gambling Disorders, the platform allows data collection on potential risk behavior. The paper summarizes the preliminary results of the platform’s first testing phase, conducted on a heterogeneous sample of children aged 6 to 8 years, attending a primary school in the province of Taranto (Apulia, Italy). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gambling disorder is placed in DSM-5 among addictive disorders in the subsection of "non-substance-related disorders", defining it as «persistent and recurrent problematic gambling behavior leading to clinically significant impairment or distress, in a 12-month period» (APA, 2013). The aim of this paper, through a review of the literature and a description of a clinical case, is to highlight the relational aspect of the GAP disorder by describing different forms of "relationship pathology" among its main effects. National and international literature highlights how the gambling represents a traumatic family experience, that involves all the systems of the player life with both human and social costs; in particular, gambling becames part of the dynamics between the couple and of the parent-child bond, assuming particular configurations and meanings for both symbolic and relational point of view. The presence of pathological mechanisms in the couple relationship hidden by an apparent complicity that actually underlies a co-dependent relation between the partners, constitutes a first aspect that reinforces the pathological gaming. The present paper focuses attention on couple therapy, in a systemic perspective, to overcome the concept of the gambling as an "individual intrapsychic phenomenon" and to identify the factors that may co-occur the onset and maintenance of pathological behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]