An Experiment In Awareness
Here’s a simple 2-part experiment for you:
Part 1 – The next time you are in a conversation—with family, friends, coworkers or even a friendly stranger—say something like “Drugs and alcohol can be addictive and there are a lot of people who have problems with drugs and alcohol”
Part 2 – Make the same statement but substitute “Gambling” for “Drugs and Alcohol”. Compare/contrast with the previous reaction.
My sharp intuitive faculty tells me that most of you will not actually perform this experiment. Fair enough. But if you did, recording the reaction of the listener, or even the reaction of your own mind—most of us would notice a difference. The typical reaction when we mention that there are issues with drugs and alcohol will most likely be a long pause waiting for completion of your thought or an impatient expression followed by a comment like:
“Duh… who doesn’t know that?”
On the other hand (unless the listener(s) has personal or professional experience), the typical reaction to “did you know that gambling can be addictive and that there are a lot of people struggling with destructive gambling disorders?” would likely be something like a raised eyebrow with a mutter of
“Really?”
Of course some listeners might know this and some might have personal experience, but mostly, our minds and mouths will tell a significant difference. This difference in typical reaction is telling and its growing importance is clear when you consider some of the statistics supporting the statement we asserted about problem gambling.
Read these aloud:
- 4-6 million U.S. residents will have a gambling problem in a given year.
- An additional 2-million meet the criteria for classification as a pathological gambler.
- It is estimated that each problem gambler affects 5-10 other people through the consequences of their addiction.
- Suicide is more common among problem gamblers than all other addictions combined.
These stats seems to be saying that problem gambling is a growing epidemic in the U.S. while our informal experiment seems to testify that the statistics and the danger they suggest are largely unknown. And there are some good arguments that this cultural awareness and social acknowledgement really matter. Part of the reason they matter is that when such awareness becomes formalized and makes its way into our social institutions it modifies relevant aspects of those institutions. For example, awareness of gambling disorder helps inspire creation of regulation within the gambling industry. Another, more subtle but more also visceral reason, is that when we are socially aware of a potential danger we become much more mindful of that danger. We talk to our kids about it, we keep our eyes open for it, we inform our decisions with it, and we become more ready, willing and able to recognize its signs, symptoms or occurrence.
In sum: being aware of the danger helps us to prevent and treat the problems associated with that danger. Until we have social acknowledgement of the problems associated with gambling, we are more susceptible to them.