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Moving Away from Individual Responsibility: A Comment
Howard J Shaffer1, Robert Ladouceur2
1Harvard Medical School, Morris E. Chafetz Associate Professor of Psychiatry; Distinguished Faculty, Division on Addiction, Cambridge Health Alliance, Cambridge, US. howard_shaffer@hms.harvard.edu.
Abstract:
In this comment, we suggest there has been a crusade among some gambling stakeholders to move the field away from personal responsibility influences and toward social setting effects. This perspective disproportionally attributes gambling-related negative consequences to the social setting rather than the gambler. We argue that personal responsibility is a pivotal issue during the emotional maturation of healthy adults and remains essential to understanding intemperate gambling. This comment explores this movement away from personal responsibility and briefly discusses some of the iatrogenic consequences that this position might create in a clinical setting.
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