Have you read about the Detroit man who was about to pull 1.5 million out of a bank ATM? His account was being transferred from his old bank to the bank that bought them out. Due to a strange glitch, it just let him keep taking money out.
He then went out and gambled it all away. Lost it ALL.
This does not shock me in any way. People with any kind of addition have an off kilter logic process. Things that seem unreasonable to most people make sense to them and seem like a viable course of action. People with a gambling addiction are no different. I see how this might have gone down.
Having worked in a jail that housed people with gambling addiction, I can tell you the logic probably went like this:
I can win enough to put it all back and still come out ahead. I’ll go to the casino, track, game, whatever, and I’ll put it back in the morning and no one gets hurt.
But person with the kind of gambling addiction that would make it seem okay to take out 1.5 million, since the bank was letting him anyway, is not the type of gambler that would ever be able to pull off that kind of winning streak. In fact, they are far more likely to lose and lose big.
Because people with an addition often transfer their addiction to another substance, and people with a substance abuse addiction can shift away from a substance to gambling, it makes it seem like it is a weird form of substance abuse. In fact, the treatment programs are similar to substance abuse treatments and the support groups are similar to AA and NA.
On the other hand, substance abuse usually involves a craving for something whereas gambling seems to be a compulsion to do something, make is seem more like a compulsion based disorder. It makes me wonder if there might be more success in treating gambling addiction with methods for treating both types of disorders rather than just treating it like a substance addiction.
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