Abstract
Gambling disorder is an addiction that can cause major suffering, and some populations seem to be more vulnerable than others. Offender populations have a remarkably high prevalence of gambling problems and they are also over-represented in a number of diagnoses related to gambling disorder, like substance use disorders and antisocial personality disorder. Yet, there are few studies investigating gambling disorder prevalence and related psychiatric comorbidity in this group. This study aims to investigate the prevalence of, and association between, gambling disorder and other psychiatric diagnoses in a sample of young, male violent offenders. Two hundred and sixty-four male offenders, all serving sentences for violent crimes (recruited between 2010 and 2012) participated in this study and went through comprehensive psychiatric evaluation, including assessment for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 4th Edition criteria. Sixteen percent of the participants met criteria for gambling disorder. Antisocial personality disorder, cannabis, cocaine and anabolic steroids abuse were significantly more common among participants with gambling disorder. The gambling disorder group also showed significantly lower educational attainment. Cocaine abuse and failure to graduate elementary and middle school in expected time were independently associated with gambling disorder in a regression analysis. This study confirms the previously described high prevalence of gambling disorder in offenders. The psychiatric comorbidity was high and the problems had started early, with lower educational attainment in the gambling disorder group. The findings stress the importance of increased awareness of gambling problems among convicted offenders and of gambling research on young people with delinquent behavior. There is a need of more research to investigate this further, in order to develop preventive strategies and treatment.
Highlights
Gambling disorder is known to cause severe harm on both individual and societal levels (Langham et al 2016)
During the past four decades, a total of 37 studies focusing on prevalence of gambling disorder in offender populations have been performed; 27 articles with varying methods are included in the review by Williams and colleagues (2005), five more are summed in the literature part of a study by Zurhold et al (2014), and another five have been published the last years (Kerber et al 2012; Turner et al 2013; May-Chahal et al 2016; Tessenyi and Kovacs 2016; April and Weinstock 2017)
Under the assumption that this cohort is representative for young Swedish male violent offenders, this corresponds to a 95% confidence interval for the true proportion of gambling disorder in this population at 12.0–21.3%
Summary
Gambling disorder is known to cause severe harm on both individual and societal levels (Langham et al 2016). According to a systematic review, the prevalence of gambling problems in offender populations is remarkably high, with an average of about 33%, and a high degree of variability (5–73%, problem and pathological gambling combined) in the estimates, depending on differences in assessment methods, size and quality of the studies (Williams et al 2005). Despite this well known connection, and the fact that criminality is associated with a number of different psychiatric diagnoses, there are relatively few studies that focus on criminality and gambling. As far as the authors of this study know, there is no previous study on offenders performing full DSM diagnostics, including gambling disorder
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