Developing and Evaluating Effectiveness of a Reinstatement Tutorial

Overview

This study will compare a computerized tutorial to a brochure in terms of their education impact of people who wish to end voluntary self-exclusion. Voluntary self-exclusion is a program used by people who seek to bar themselves from further access to the casino or other gambling venue. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), in cooperation with Ontario Lottery and Gaming (OLG), is developing a tutorial designed to provide practical information to players who choose to reinstate and return to gambling. The goal of this study is to determine if this new computerized tutorial decreases the harm of gambling experienced by gamblers who are reinstated. For example, are they less likely to relapsing to problematic levels of gambling.

Voluntary self-exclusion is a program used by people who seek to bar themselves from further access to the casino or other gambling venue. Currently there are over 10000 people in the program. Although some self-exclusion programs place a permanent ban on the individual, others offer the possibility of reinstatement after a period of time. Many problem gamblers actually do change their minds about self-exclusion and wish to return to gambling. Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), in cooperation with Ontario Lottery and Gaming (OLG), is developing a tutorial designed to provide practical information to players who choose to reinstate and return to gambling. The goal of this study is to evaluate an the intervention to determine its impact on problem gamblers who is reinstated from relapsing to problematic levels of gambling. The content for the tutorial will be informed by CAMH, will be developed for land based gambling, and also adapted for online gambling as well.