“Responsible gambling” has become the internationally accepted way of referring to all policies and strategies that have as their goal the prevention and amelioration of the harmful impacts arising from gambling (Productivity Commission, 1999). This includes:

1. Direct treatment of client problem gamblers and their families.

2. Harm minimisation initiatives.

3. Community awareness campaigns.

The following sequence of chapters briefly examines the possible implications of the measurement and modelling of impaired control for the treatment of problem gamblers (this chapter), for harm minimisation (Chapter 6) and in the case study of Victoria (Chapter 7) provides a working illustration of the integration of the broad range of strategies.

Do Existing Treatments Work? Conclusions from Treatment Literature Reviews

Recent reviews of the literature describing the treatment of problem and pathological gamblers have tended to be somewhat optimistic about the efficacy of the available methods (Lopez Viets & Miller, 1997; Victorian Department of Human Services (DHS), 2000; GRP, 2003a). This must be tempered by the findings of Oakley-Browne & Mobberly (2002) who, in applying the rigorous criteria of the Cochrane Review, found only four randomised controlled trials. They were only able to conclude that there was a lack of evidence for the effective treatment of pathological gambling but that cognitive–behavioural interventions were more effective than control treatments for both short- and long-term outcome evaluations (e.g. Ladouceur et al., 2001).