I used to watch a lot of video interviews with addicted gamblers. They told me how they went through treatment and one thing struck me. More precisely, this thing is quite natural in relation to addiction treatment, as I understood later, but I did not immediately understand the logic. We are talking about weaning from gaming. I thought that weaning from gaming would most likely only work in very advanced cases, when the player is at the bottom of a financial crisis or on the verge of suicide. Then weaning from gaming would most likely work well. But if this is not the case, then what is the benefit of weaning from gaming? Perhaps the logic is to create positive habits in a person. But, in my opinion, this does not allow us to identify the main reason for gaming and work on it. In my opinion, the real reason is that a person has a naive desire to get rich on gambling (, but he does not have even the slightest competence for this and it is more than likely that they will not appear. This is if we are talking about sports betting. If a person wants to get rich on casino games, such as roulette, and does not want to know anything about risk management and money management, then weaning from games is really necessary. And what do you think, does refusal to play (deprivation) contribute to recovery from addiction or is it useless?
Yes, that's absolutely true. Technically, I believe weaning, or limiting access to games, is designed to cut off exposure to addictive stimuli that trigger dopamine pathways in the brain. This will reduce the risk of relapse and allow for other therapies, such as cognitive therapy. I once read a study showing that voluntary self-exclusion is indeed effective, and the results showed that participants who participated in this program gambled less frequently and spent less money. You can see the discussion in this article:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214782920301202However, this system isn't perfect in my opinion—for example, I've seen data and news from Sweden that showed that up to 49% of participants in the national Spelpaus program were still able to gamble through foreign websites. The research paper can be read here:
https://harmreductionjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12954-023-00822-wFurthermore, global data shows that the use of self-exclusion is much higher among problem gamblers (15%) than among the general population (0.26%).
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40429-023-00510-6So, in my opinion, weaning isn't the final solution, but it remains important as an "emergency brake" that greatly supports everyone's recovery process.