The Commons and Differences --An Urgent Need to Localize CBT in Chinese Gambling Addiction Treatment

Abstract

Pathological gambling, or gambling disorder, was more familiar as gambling addiction in Chinese society, which is considered to bring enormous damage to both individuals psychological health and social economic improvement, features as a serious of error cognition with behavior dysfunctions in the past 12 months according to a DSM-V standard. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), as one of the four main psychotherapies, plays a suitable role in helping patients adjust to both cognition and behavior imbalance induced by gambling addiction. However, it still leads to a huge gap in how it developed in China compared with the broader application and its effectiveness study of CPT in gambling addiction from foreign countries. In this paper, the localization of CBT in treating addictive gambling is summarized in social burden to show its urgent need, with related problems pointed out, such as shortage of qualified therapists, lack of mature cohort study design with poor usage, unbalanced target population spread with ignored problem severity.