A Critical Review of the Scholarly Discourse on Gambling Disorder Treatment

Abstract

This article presents a comprehensive review of the scholarly discourse on psychological and relational approaches to gambling disorder treatment. The article focuses on the “what” of knowledge production and treatment delivery by systematizing information on the types of scholarly articles that have been published in the English language; the treatment approaches that have been researched and discussed in the Anglophone literature; and the context of knowledge production over the past 50 years. The review includes 445 articles that present the findings of case studies and evaluations of disordered gambling interventions (k = 231), descriptive research (k = 49), meta-analyses (k = 10), and literature reviews and descriptions of novel approaches (k = 155). The findings show that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), together with its constituent approaches, was the most discussed and researched approach to gambling disorder treatment in the period between late 1960s and the first half of 2019, covered by about 60% of the articles. Motivational Interviewing approaches were discussed in over one-fifth of the articles, whereas psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches accounted for under 10% of the articles. Roughly three-quarters of articles included in the review were published in North American and international journals. Our discussion situates these trends in critical discourses of the medicalization of mental health, dominance of Western mental health frameworks, and the politics of knowledge production.