Christos was “clean” of gambling for 759 days. Today, at 32, he remembers playing from a very young age. “We used to play dice during recess in high school,” he says characteristically. Pantelis, 43, cannot gamble for 758 days. He started gambling in the second grade, “Tanasi, Kum Kang, Propo,” he says. “Consciously” he played for 23 years. He came very close to losing everything, especially his family. “I thought my daughter was a bitch. The child came up to me to hug, and if I was playing at that moment, I would push him away, “he admits. Both of them played” every day, all the time “before they got into the rehabilitation center. As described in” K”, “Your thoughts are only about this. How will you feed the beast? It’s not about profit. You don’t even look at the numbers. You want adrenaline. Up and down. “Balancing” emotions.”

Christos and Pantelis are members of KETHEA ALPHA, one of the programs for “legal addictions”: alcohol and gambling, for which demand is constantly growing, and the waiting time for membership is more than three months. According to KETHEA representatives, recently most of the calls received by the organization’s call center are related to a specific program. In 2021, KETHEA’s 1114 gambling line answered 1,915 calls from people asking for support, up from 1,370 calls in 2020 and 1,114 calls in 2019. Gambling turnover exceeded 29 billion euros in 2022, an increase of 28.8% compared to 2021 and 83% compared to 2019.

“K” was in KETHEA ALPHA and talked with Christos and Pantelis, who talk about their journey, about their addictions – about their own “visit to Roulettenburg” by Fyodor Dostoevsky (a fictional resort town with a casino hall in the novel “The Gambler”) – and efforts to rehabilitation.

As the chairman of the board of directors “K” points out. KETHEA Christos Liapis, “there is a trend towards an increase in the number of people with problematic gambling attitudes, as well as a decrease in the age of these people, which may be a consequence of the pandemic. The quarantine, the pandemic, and the psychological connection of these conditions have pushed for an exemption from gambling, especially electronic gambling. In the same context, many teenagers who have been locked up at home for long periods of time, in front of a screen, have easy access to their parents’ plastic money.” Mr Gitakos emphasizes that “this is something we have to keep an eye on. It will take time to see if this trend will eventually strengthen or if we will return to normal.” It is noted that back in 2019, it was measured within the framework of the European ESPAD program on addictions in the student population (NRU “Institute of Mental Health”) that almost every ninth young person aged 16 to 18 years (10.7%) in our country is at risk for a pathological profession, and 2.6% already have a pathological profession.

Perhaps the best description of gambling addiction in world literature is given by Fyodor Dostoevsky in his work The Gambler. His hero, Alexey Ivanovich, tells about one of his visits to the Roulettenburg casino: “I was completely burned. I took all this amount and put it in minus. And suddenly I came to my senses. And only once during all that night, during the whole game, fear seized me and made my arms and legs tremble. I felt horrified and suddenly realized what it would mean for me if I lost now! My whole life has been in this game!”