alt Hacker News> "Emergency room visits for gambling disorders"
Huh?
> "More than 70 per cent of gambling disorder emergency department visits involved another mental health condition or heavy substance use and almost one-third of the visits led to hospital admission."
Ok, so I assume they mean that these emergency visits were for things like drug overdoses and psychotic episodes in people led to by their gambling disorders, not for the gambling disorders themselves. What a strange way of writing this up. A gambling disorder is a chronic problem, not an acute one.
There's a difference between "emergency visit for X" where you treat X and "emergency visit (for Y) because of X" where you treat Y proximal to X, and people could learn to be more discerning in their use and interpretation of language.
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The paper lists the mental health conditions as "anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorders, self-harm, acute stress reaction and other". I'm surprised that multiple people went into the ER to seek treatment for a gambling addiction without being flagged for anything else. It seems like there should be a better place for people looking for help to go.
I wonder how many were for suicide attempts after a huge loss specifically.
Yeah, that was kind of odd.
Maybe they also mean suicidality after ending up in a ton of debt? Or just other self-harm because of it?
Personally, I really don’t like the expansion of legalized gambling. I’m not surprised it’s causing serious issues.
I would at least be more OK if it happened but advertising was heavily restricted/banned in context. The fact that every professional sport seems to be nothing but a thin wrapper around gambling ads now can’t possibly be good for us as a society.
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> emergency department visits in which a gambling disorder was recorded as either the main or a contributing reason for the visit.
from the study
> An ED visit for a gambling disorder was defined on the basis of the clinical judgement of the treating team and was identified when ICD-10 codes F63.0 (pathological gambling) or Z726 (gambling or betting problems) were coded as the main or contributing reason for the visit.
> In 29.3% of these ED visits, a gambling disorder was listed as the primary cause of the visit,