Comparing public perceptions of substance addictions and behavioural addictions

Identifying addictions in peers is vital for early referral and improving outcomes. Substance addictions such as alcoholism and cocaine addiction have been recognised for a long time whereas behavioural addictions such as gambling and especially gaming are relatively new addictions. This study aims to evaluate public perceptions of substance addictions compared to behavioural addictions.

The six ICD-10 characteristics of dependence were incorporated into a series of vignettes. Participants in an online survey were asked to use a Likert scale to judge the presence and severity of addictions. The responses were analysed using the Wilcoxon Sum Rank test to allow the groups to be compared.

Of the 247 participants, participants were more likely to say someone was addicted to gambling in the not addicted questions and lightly addicted question sets than the other addictions studied. Alcohol addiction was the poorest identified addiction amongst participants in the lightly addicted questions and was also poorly identified in the heavily addicted questions. Lightly addicted behaviour was poorly identified by participants in all four addictions studied.

The hypothesis that substance addictions are recognised better than behavioural addictions was unsubstantiated. Gambling was seen as the most addictive behaviour/substance of the four addictions whilst alcohol addiction was not recognised when minor dependent traits were exhibited and poorly recognised with heavily dependent traits. Public interventions may be needed to improve peer identification of alcohol addiction in their peers. This study indicates that the general public does not identify any minor addictions in their peers sufficiently to improve outcomes for patients.