Among 96 Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese participants, nearly 60 percent were found to be pathological gamblers, said Nancy Petry, an associate professor of psychiatry at the UConn Health Center, who conducted the study with the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services.

"I have never seen or heard of such high rates of gambling problems. It is mind-boggling. I kept thinking it was a mistake," said Petry, who also is conducting the first National Institutes of Health study of treatment options for pathological gamblers. "It's really quite frightening. I've never seen this kind of rate in any population."

Pathological gamblers are preoccupied with gambling and often are unable to control their gambling, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. About 2 percent of the overall adult population are believed to be pathological gamblers.

Petry said social workers think the high rates may be partially due to the trauma that these refugees suffered before fleeing their native countries as well as less of a cultural bias against gambling among some Asians. However, she said, so little research has been done into the relationship between Asians and gambling, it is hard to say.

Both Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods Resort Casino have extensive marketing and promotional campaigns aimed at the Asian community. For example, buses bring gamblers around the clock from Chinatown communities in both Boston and New York.

"This is a major problem. It's also one that gambling establishments are well aware of and they are focusing their marketing to this population," said Terry Lewis, deputy director of Asian Family Services Inc. of Hartford.

"It is one of the things we would like to look at," said Lewis, whose organization provides counseling and other mental health services. "There's a tremendous lack of services available."

Petry's researchers, in an effort to begin to gauge the depth of gambling problems among Asians, surveyed individuals at community service organizations, using a widely used gambling questionnaire that was translated into native languages. Participants were not selected randomly, but on their willingness to complete the survey.

Petry and other researchers said the matter must be studied much more deeply and the new results raise troubling questions.

"Extraordinarily high rates of gambling participation and problems were noted," said the study, which was published in the August issue of Psychiatric Services, the journal of the American Psychiatric Association. More than 60 percent of participants reported wagering more than $100 on a typical gambling day, with 42 percent betting more than $500 in the two months before completing the survey.

"Given that the median annual income of the participants was about $25,000, very large proportions of income were expended on gambling," the study concluded.

Theanvy Kuoch, one of the study's authors and executive director of Khmer Health Advocates in West Hartford, said the high rates of gambling are hardly surprising for a population that has suffered so much. Many Cambodian refugees, for example, fled their country after years of imprisonment and persecution under the terrorist Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s, when an estimated 1.7 million people died.

"A lot of people are trying to escape. They go to casinos and they don't have to think about it," she said. "A lot of people work two or three jobs. They want to get away from painful memories."

"They lost their families, their belongings and their country. They came to a new culture and they don't have access to a lot of new things," Kuoch said. "I think gambling is like a form of recreation."

Taken from www.ctnow.com