The American Society of Addiction Medicine has a developed a new way of classifying addiction. “The definition, a result of a four-year process involving more than 80 leading experts in addiction and neurology, emphasizes that addiction is a primary illness – in other words its not caused by mental health issues such as mood or personality disorders, putting to rest the popular notion that addictive behaviors are a form of “self-medication” to, say, ease the pain of depression or anxiety.”
This new definition refutes a great deal of research funded by predatory gambling operators that claim that gambling addicts are merely suffering from another form of mental illness and that they would simply substitute a gambling addiction with another addiction.