An economic  downturn has many social consequences, forcing us to re-examine our priorities, especially where our hip pocket is concerned.

So perhaps it is more than a little surprising to learn that all forms of gambling are on the increase.

Now, I’m not about to wax indignant on the horrors of the seven deadly sins – merely to remark on the apparent contradiction that when people have less they seem more prepared to take unnecessary risks to gain more, in spite of the reality that poor bookies are a rare breed.

Gamblers, or rather compulsive gamblers, don’t make it frequently to the psychiatrist, tending to be more secretive about their behaviour than many others stricken by addictive behaviour.

Compulsive gamblers are by nature confirmed optimists.

They live in that constant hope that tomorrow they will win back all their money with enough interest to justify the initial wager.

In addition, the compulsive gambler has a remarkable capacity to deny the reality of how much he has lost, especially when the rush is on, the roulette wheel is spinning and the adrenalin is coursing through his veins, giving him a ‘high’ equal to any other drug.

At that particular point he would probably sell his grandmother for just one more flutter.

It is debatable whether compulsive gambling is an illness.  But there can be little doubt as to the destruction that it wreaks on the families of the many sufferers.

To those who stand outside such behaviour it seems amazing that anyone should deny logic and waste so much for so little in such a short space of time.

In the past, gambling has been portrayed either as the sport of the idle rich wearing white dinner jackets and smoking cheroots or by the small man in the dirty raincoat surreptitiously sneaking a few crumpled notes to an equally shady character outside the pub.

Of course, these are very restricted word pictures of a problem that extends to every section of our community, and whether it be the odd Scratch It or a genteel game of bingo, gambling is part of our lifestyle.

That is not to say that it doesn’t bring a great number of folk a great deal of enjoyment without necessarily doing anybody any harm.

But having said that, this is the tip of the iceberg.

To explain this it’s probably easier to look at the lifestyle of a once wealthy man who, for the sake of anonymity, we’ll call him Jim.

Jim had earned his money in the production of a minor engineering component that no-one else much wanted to make.

He duly made his pile and burned the candle at both ends.

Eventually he was told that he had to retire, and not being particularly elderly he came to live in the sunny climes of south-east Queensland.

When he arrived he became deeply involved in building his new home and planting out his garden.

He ended up with what most of us think we most desire – peace and quiet, and freedom to do precisely what we’d like without having to go to work.

In other words, from being highly stressed and well rewarded he became totally without a goal, without stimulus, and his life had little meaning.

Jim was not well programmed for sitting around and doing nothing.

He wasn’t into painting sunsets, and working for Meals on Wheels wasn’t his style, so one evening he wandered over to the local gaming establishment and within a short time he had lost $400,000.  What’s more, he didn’t stop there.  He went back again and again, and although he occasionally had winnings in the order of tens of thousands of dollars he lost a great deal more than he won.

He eventually sought help from Gamblers Anonymous only after his wife had left him and the house was sold.

Why had Jim committed this unconscious, but for him extremely exciting, act of sabotage on his life since he was clearly not a victim of stress?

Jim could be said to be suffering from an addictive personality, which had been an economic advantage while he was at work.

But when that was taken away from him he was left without any goals and, whether unconsciously or otherwise, he provided himself with a mechanism which gave an immediate buzz, as well as providing him with a new-found reason for going back to work.

Challenging and helping folk like Jim is the day-to-day job of Gamblers Anonymous.

But the first stage we must all acknowledge is that there is one thing worse than being over-stressed and that is to be under-stimulated.

If we find ourselves in this state we have a built-in escape button, and one of these is provided by gambling.

for me; I have to say, with great difference to his wisdom, that I cannot in all honesty remember a single thing we discussed, but doubtless it was all terribly deep and meaningful.  However, in case he should ever read these few words, there was an important piece of wisdom that he did manage to communicate with me, and that was through the milieu of one of his favourite tee-shirts, which had emblazoned across its front the simple sentence “never never confuse sympathy with therapy”.

I have to admit that I always thought it a little harsh, but that was before the days when I learnt that sympathy and empathy might sound roughly the same word but are a long way apart in terms of their meaning.

Practically speaking I came to learn what my supervisors tee-shirt was actually telling me; our daughter, little Lucy-Clare, had the misfortune to be born with what is known as congenital heart disease, a pump in her chest resembled a badly wired colander, if such a metaphor doesn’t sound too outrageous; the reaction among the medical fraternity in which I worked was a polarised one, stretching across all the many faces and moods that human experience can muster.

One swing of the pendulum was symptomatised by a one time thoracic surgeon (his father had been taught by the great Karl Gustaff Jung) who had rejected his earlier training and gone into the world of psychiatry in general, and psychotherapy in particular; he was, and as far as I know still is, a beautiful soul, he exuded sympathy from every pore, yet somehow every time he wished to express sympathy for the situation our family found ourselves in I felt more and more frustrated, and indeed more and more anxious, for he had been a thoracic surgeon, so that maybe he knew a great deal more than could go wrong than I did.

At the other end of the scale was Mary, Mary was an exceedingly tough American psychoanalyst, an inappropriate blink of the eye, the manner in which the arms were crossed over the chest, let alone the words that I used were all grist to the mill of her interpretations.  Frankly in many ways Mary terrified me, which would have horrified Mary because underneath it all she really was a very caring soul; a few days before our family’s trip to London, for the fatal day, for the rendezvous for open heart surgery, I observed Mary arrive at our front door; I was terrified, I perceived indeed expected interpretation to pour out of her, after she knocked on the door I somewhat reluctantly opened it, expecting to be showered with wisdom from on high, instead all I received was a quick smile, and she reached into her handbag and presented me with a large bottle of brandy, with the words “I guess you might be needing this” and she went upon her way.

I guess the question posed relates to which of the two therapies were the more effective, and the answer I might leave to you, gentle reader.

I’m not entirely sure if I really was wandering “lonely” as one of Wordsworth’s clouds, but it certainly was a wonderful Easter during my visit back to “the old Country”, and particularly to have opportunity to travel back to that small village in Derbyshire where I had come to know not only my wife, but also her beloved parents.  Certainly the daffodils were in profusion on the day I arrived, and I noticed with some nostalgia that the letterbox which had stood by the post office for those many decades, had actually been moved, and changed from cast iron into one of the newer more efficient plastic varieties; where I live, I fear I barely notice if another monstrous high rise building, resembling a series of concrete coffins stacked into the sky, has arisen overnight.

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The lady had parked her spanking new bright red Mercedes Sports car right outside my consulting room, nobody could have missed it, fortunately my next patient did, for she had effectively completely blocked the entry in to my rather small car park; somewhat symbolically, the lady was also dressed in bright red leather, clearly not the kind of thing that could be purchased outside Milan, though perhaps a trifle inappropriate, bearing in mind the outside temperature was in excess of 30° centigrade.  This was one extremely expensive lady and the fact that her address was in one of the condominiums to be found in that part of the town which we have nicknamed as “Vain Beach” came as absolutely no surprise whatsoever.

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