Self-management and the treatment of gambling addiction: a rationale

Self-management programs are now a well-accepted approach to assisting people with chronic and complex health conditions to manage their illness and their lives more comprehensively, and, as a result, enjoy better quality of life and health outcomes. Such approaches have now been developed for a wide range of chronic conditions and many programs are generic in that they are not illness-specific. This paper explores the possibility of peer education and self-management as the next frontier in the treatment of gambling addiction and asks whether the expert patient approach that has been shown to be successful in the management of chronic disease might gainfully be applied to the treatment of problem gambling.