Liz Karter is a female therapist who has been working with female pathological gamblers for the past 10 years. She has collected a decade of clinical observations and experiences with her patients and has written about them in an accessible, non-academic way that lends itself to a much wider readership than much of the existing literature on the subject of problem gambling.
The topics covered are primarily from a gender-specific perspective, but nevertheless give true insight into the suffering caused by the addiction when it takes over. There is enough reference in the early part of the book to the British Gambling Prevalence Survey and to the set of recognised criteria in DSM-IV to make this not just a collection of patients' experiences. However, a third into the book the tone changes and the focus shifts clearly to the individual patients and their stories. These are well written and offer a full range of aetiology as well as consequences linked to the illness. They will be very helpful to training clinicians wanting to ‘get a feel’ for the illness without a large cohort of patients waiting to be assessed.
Women who grew up as children of addicts and gambled to escape the fear and uncertainty life brought them, women who gambled to get away from the pain and exhaustion of having a child with disability, women whose marriages were violent and who gambled for a moment of hope and to dream of an alternative life. All of these stories repeat themselves in our clinics on a daily basis. The beauty of this book is to have captured them, acknowledged their existence and the need for us as clinicians to treat these women and their gambling within the context of earlier adverse life events.
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