Features of Gambling Disorder and Internet Gaming Disorder in the spectrum of addictive disorders

It might be hard to imagine that a leisure activity could turn to suffering and mental disorder in need of treatment. Nevertheless, emergent behavioral addictions (BAs) such as gambling disorder (GD) and Internet use disorders (e.g., Internet gaming disorder [IGD) have become common treatment-seeking motives in dedicated facilities and a flourishing field for research. These recent entities and their similarities to substance use disorders (SUDs) have raised debate in the scientific community and among clinicians. A major resulting revolution is that the addictive spectrum has recently been enlarged to include addictions that do not require the intake of a psychoactive substance. This inclusion has sparked debate on addiction determinism and whether neurobiological processes could be involved in repetitive exposure to a substance, as well as in cognitions and behaviors. A core clinical addiction syndrome can be extracted by comparing recent diagnostic criteria for SUDs in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.; DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2013) with those for the two considered BAs: GD and IGD. Clinical, psychological, and neurobiological differences and similarities between BAs and SUDs are reviewed and discussed in the present work. Critical links are made between these scientific findings and recent DSM-5 criteria. A full picture of the magnitude of BAs remains imprecise because of several methodological limitations, a lack of standardized screening tools being the major obstacle. We present a recent study (Appendix 4) that we conducted to test the factorial structure of the most commonly used screening tool in which we made some psychometric enhancement proposals. We also presented the relevance of this screening tool for online GD and IGD. The research complexity (financial, ethical, and technical, as well as access to targeted samples) of this field is illustrated by the paper on IGD (Appendix 1). Our results nevertheless contribute to a better understanding ...