You think we’re joking, right?
But a hospital in Great Britain has a website devoted to cryptocurrency as a gambling addiction.
Castle Craig Hospital in Peeblesshire, Scotland (near Edinburgh) has a handy ten-question screening test to help you determine if you have such a gambling addiction, and they would be happy to treat you for it. If you answer “yes” to just one of these questions, you are likely addicted and desperately need help.
The “screening test” sounds a lot like the fraudulent “depression screening” tests promulgated by unscrupulous psychiatrists eager to prescribe you psychotropic drugs.
The recommended treatment is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), supplemented with an antidepressant to help you with low moods, and the publicly funded National Health Service in the United Kingdom would be happy to help you get treatment.
CBT, as we’ve remarked previously, is a form of psychotherapy that attempts to modify dysfunctional emotions, behaviors, and thoughts — by evaluating for the person, challenging the person’s behaviors, and getting the person to change those behaviors, often in combination with psychiatric drugs.
This approach assumes addiction is a disease. This is patently false; such addiction is a moral failing. It cannot be cured with drugs.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) lists “Gambling disorder” as a mental disorder, but then it also lists “Religious or spiritual problem” as a mental disorder, so you can see that it is not really helpful, since the traditional and most effective treatment for gambling is religious or spiritual.
The World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases version 11, released 18 June 2018, has a number of entries for various addictions, which it also considers as diseases — new in this edition is Gaming Disorder. Other so-called addictive behaviors in ICD-11 are Gambling Disorder, and of course the two catch-all disorders for the rest of us, “Other specified disorders due to addictive behaviours” and “Disorders due to addictive behaviours, unspecified.”
If someone is exhibiting behavioral problems, there are many things that can be done besides the exclusive drug- and behavior modification-based options that are the backbone of mental health services today.
The entirety of these psychological and psychiatric programs are founded on the tacit assumptions that mental health “experts” know all about the mind and mental phenomena, know a better way of life, a better value system and how to improve lives beyond the understanding and capability of everyone else in society.
The reality is that these mental health programs are designed to control people towards specific ideological objectives at the expense of the person’s sanity and well-being. Do we really want to institutionalize mandatory psychiatric counseling and screening, which is where all this is heading?
By the way, if you’re clueless about cryptocurrency, you can find out more about it by clicking here, but please refrain from gambling on it.