Mark Griffiths
Dr. Mark D. Griffiths is a Chartered Psychologist and Distinguished Professor of Behavioural Addiction at Nottingham Trent University, where he directs the International Gaming Res...
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Who are you?
Hi there. My name's Dr. Mark Griffiths. I'm distinguished professor of behavioural addiction at Notting Trent University. If you want to know about gambling, if you want to know about gambling addiction, if you want to know about the association between gambling addiction and mental health problems, and if you want to find a bit more about what are the most important factors that determine whether somebody gets a gambling addiction, come speak to me.
What is your background?
Okay. I'm a psychologist. I've been working in the area of addiction now for 37 years. I did a PhD on slot machine addiction that I started back in 1987, and then in 1989 I started work on video game addiction. In 1995, I started work on internet addiction. I was very first person in the world to publish a paper on that. In 1997, I started working on exercise addiction. In 2001, I started working on sex addiction. In 2005, started working on work addiction. Then 2010 started working on social media addiction. So I've been working the area of gambling addiction 37 years and working in all these other areas of behavioural addiction, a little less time, and it's one thing that's just excited me, enthused me. And addiction is such a wonderful area to study. There's no simple answer to what addiction is, and that's why I'll be in a job for life.
Why did you become an expert of behavioural addiction?
A lot of people ask me why I've become an expert. I mean, when you first start in an area you don't know you're going to be an expert. But I soon realise, actually, even after three years of doing a PhD, you did become the expert in that area because so few people across the world even were actually doing anything on gambling addiction because people describe me as addicted to publishing, which if I'm addicted to publishing, it's the best addiction that you can have in my academic career. The real short answer was straight after my undergraduate degree, people said I should do a PhD. I didn't even know what a PhD was. I went for interviews and got offered three PhD places. One of them was on gynaecological problems in women post-pregnancy. One was on face processing and one was on adolescent gambling. And the one on adolescent gambling seemed the far more interesting one to do. And I also realised compared to those other two areas, very little research had actually been done by adolescent gambling. And also from a personal perspective, my brother was addicted to slot machines. I lived in a house where we all had to lock our bedrooms because if anything was not nailed down, my brother would sell it to sell items in the house to actually fund his fruit machine addiction. My brother ended up in prison by the time he was 18 for acquisitive burglaries again to fund his slot machine addiction. Slot machine addiction was something that my family had knew nothing about. And I think a lot of parents, when they first find out that there's a gambler in the family, often their first reaction is, thank God for that. We thought it was drugs as if they think that gambling addiction isn't something that can be as serious a slot machine addiction. But my brother, he left school without any qualifications, was in prison by the time he was 18. He led a life of, even when he stopped gambling, he would go on to other addictive things. And he died by the time he was 38. So I'm somebody I know what it's like to have an addict in the family, although that wasn't the reason that I did my PhD in that area. It just happened that when I chose one of those three topics, I knew personally what it was like to live in a family of having someone that has a gambling addiction. And it quite clearly had an impact on me, my family, and it's something now. I'm so glad that I've turned that really negative experience in the family to something that's very positive.