Glossary

Terms from her work with problem gamblers and their families.

Problem gambling

A term for people who experience difficulties with their gambling.

Pathological gambling

Problem gambling at its most severe, and a recognized psychiatric disorder: a progressively chronic condition with an uncontrollable impulse to gamble. Psychologically it is close to alcohol and drug addiction, it affects the whole family, and it can be diagnosed and treated.

The feeling, not the money

Her explanation of where the addiction lies: when people gamble to escape uncomfortable feelings, to solve old life problems or for an adrenaline rush, it is the feeling that becomes addictive.

In the end, when people escape into gambling to avoid uncomfortable feelings, resolve pre-existing life problems, or get adrenaline rushes, it is the feeling that becomes addictive.

Gambler's fallacy

The false belief that if you gamble long enough, you will eventually win it all back.

Getting even

Returning on another day after a loss to win the money back. It is one of the center's screening questions.

South Oaks Gambling Screen (SOGS)

A gambling screening instrument the center used, with others, to assess the level of a person's gambling problem.

Relapse prevention framework

The setting for the center's cognitive-behavioral treatment: giving gamblers information, tools and support to begin and keep up recovery, and working on money, self-care and relationships alongside gambling.

Intensive outpatient program

A three-tier psycho-educational group program that the center offered in its early years, giving gamblers information, tools and support to begin and maintain recovery.

Psycho-educational group

A group that gives information, tools and support. At the center it was for family members of gamblers and gave them information, tools and boundaries to help support a recovering gambler.

Over-involvement in another's distress

The center's description of the partners and relatives it reached with its 2004 group "Women and Men Who Love Too Much": people who are over-involved in the distress of others.

Stigma

What she named as the reason gamblers are very ambivalent about treatment. Online sessions, she said, made it easier for people who find it hard to talk about their problem in person.

They are very ambivalent about treatment. It's the stigma.

Expert witness on pathological gambling

In 2005 she was qualified as an expert witness in pathological gambling by the San Diego and Riverside County courts and by federal courts in California and Iowa. Her testimony covered local and federal, civil and criminal cases.

CCGC

California Certified Gambling Counselor, a certification of the California Council on Problem Gambling. She held level II, number 122, from 1999.