“Treatments” for crypto trading addiction, a booming juicy market


Vincent Touveau

Cryptocurrencies

May 06, 2022 at 3:00 p.m.

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Crypto

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A Swiss detox center at $90,000 a week, or rather a session Skype with a psychologist: mental health professionals help you recover from drug addiction cryptocurrencieseven if it means paying a high price.

Volatility, leverage effects, multiplied gains and promises of wealth: crypto-currencies have certainly made a lot of people happy, but beware of the descent. With mechanisms close to those of casino high rollers, cryptocurrency addicts have solutions to get by, but the road is long.

Clinics for a sickness of the century

The private clinic Castle Craig knows the phenomenon well. Although this luxury resort, located in a charming corner of Scotland, mainly deals with problems of alcohol and addiction to gambling or drugs, it also proposes to treat addiction to crypto-currencies, which is a rather recent disease.

Because, if 50% of people who own crypto bought it for the first time in 2021, it has already been 14 years since Bitcoin swept the world. Since 2018, the number of people declaring themselves “addicted” to cryptocurrency has increased by 300%. And this represents a financial windfall for some health professionals.

Indeed, the entrance tickets for this kind of clinics represent a substantial investment. Even if a visit to Castle Craig (16,000 euros per week) is apparently largely reimbursed by social security, you must already be able to present the sum to start therapy. The Paracelsus clinic in Zurich, Switzerland, is claiming huge sums (90,000 CHF for a week and 500 CHF for an online consultation) which guarantee luxury medical treatment.

Dogecoin, cocaine: same fight

How does a dive into crypto hell begin? You enter it a bit like pushing the door of a casino, since the n° 4 dopamine receptors contained in the brain react in the same way as a good old roulette wheel. The individual is often preoccupied with chasing a high, which easily materializes thanks to the extraordinary volatility of crypto-assets. This was particularly the case in the period 2017-2020, where major currencies and memecoins (Dogecoin) reached record highs.

But is excessive cryptocurrency trading recognized as a pathological disorder? Yes and no, because it is a relatively recent problem and still little studied. After all, gambling addiction has only very recently been recognized as a pathology. It was once considered a simple impulse.

Testimonials collected on cryptocurrency addiction often mention parallel addictions, such as alcohol and cocaine, which are added to the mix. The common denominator of these substance abuses and these behaviors is the search for escape from boredom and reality, thanks to the excitation of the n° 4 dopamine receptor of our brain.

Day trading and other temptations

Businessmen have long understood the human craving for money, and the cryptocurrency enthusiast has a gigantic range to speculate in these highly volatile markets. Because these markets are never closed (not even on weekends), it is very easy to day trade on a multitude of platforms.

With leverage effects of up to x500, the investor can win astronomical sums and lose them in the same minute. The appearance of financial instruments such as binary options or spread betting have also contributed to the ruin of some people, since they are speculative methods very close to a bet.

Twelve steps to escape

What are the concrete solutions to get out of an addiction to cryptocurrency? Of course, the first step is to recognize your problem and how it affects our mental, physical and financial health. For the rest, the therapist Anthony Marini of Castle Craig gives his patients a 12-step program, already very effective in the treatment of other addictions.

Luckily, most people don’t have to go through this kind of therapy to drop cryptos if need be. In many cases, all you have to do is erase all trading apps from your smartphone and unsubscribe from crypto forums, Reddit in the lead, to consider returning to normal life.

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Source : Bloomberg



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