“ I bet it will rain today ”, “ I bet Liverpool will win the champions league ”, “ I am sure your baby will be a girl, I bet two pounds on it ”, this are sentences people can hear every day. Everybody is always betting on things, even when he is not saying it. Wearing a skirt when you do not know the weather is a bet. Humans bet on the future every day by making choices. But some people push the gamble further away. Some people are gambling with a precise purpose: to win money. For P.Wildman in "Dreamtime Myth: History As Future "(1997) gambling is “a conscious, deliberate effort to stake valuables, usually but not always currency, on how some event happens to turn out.”. In an easier way gambling is “to do something that involves risks that …show more content…
“Between 0.6% – 0.8% of the adult population in Britain are problem gamblers (between 275,000 and 370,000 people)” according to Dr Gerda Reith in Research on the Social Impacts of Gambling. The gambling addiction is also call “crack cocaine” by specialists. Depending on the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition), if you identify five of the following issues on one person, it must be addict. “Preoccupation with gambling, constant effort to obtain money with which to gamble, loss of control when gambling, gambling at ever-increasing stakes, irritability when not gambling, continuous gambling despite negative consequences, gambling to escape other issues or problems, lying about gambling, illegal activity associated with gambling, putting employment at risk in order to gamble, putting relationships or loved ones at risk in order to gamble.” This addiction create imbalance in the life. People are obsessed, they lose productivity, concentration and change their comportment. They can also be violent. The story of Adam Billing is the perfect illustration of this situation. He was a young footballer. After breaking his knee, his career suddenly stopped. He fell into a depression and start playing on line. He played for months but his bill became too high. He prefered to kill himself than to support the shame of asking money. This story shows how serious can be this addiction and how it can, destroy people. It exists now lots of gambling addiction centre treatments in England to help people return to normal