Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the critical issue connected to Public health service on gambling disorder and early interception of players. Through an ethnography of health care practice in Umbria (Italy) the paper analyses the criticalities of working dimensions and the right to health during the pandemic.

Paper long abstract:

The pandemic and global financial crisis has produced change in the social welfare field, compromising public-health policies and community welfare. The public health service dedicated to addictions (from substances or gambling) has had to face new challenges, due to the work reorganisation of the structures and the practices related to the reception of users. My work is based on an ethnography of health care practices and the processes of construction of the gambling disorder; emerges a temporal suspension of two years, both in welfare treatment and in addictions, a «freezing of addiction», in which there was an alienation from society and from "substances" also caused from the closure of game rooms. The health services have attempted an online therapeutic approach which has brought out the difficulties in accessing IT tools.

There is a political/conflictual connection between economic, labour and right to health, a close relationship emerges between health and the socio-economic inequalities that the disorder of gambling brings out. In this fieldwork, health institutions define and differentiate players with GD, necessary for the construction of a diagnosis and therapeutic path. It becomes useful to explore not only the action of the local health services, to address the phenomenon and the "early interception of problematic players", but above all the game spaces, understood as "practiced places" and "relational spaces".

In this framework, I'll discuss theoretically and ethnographically the criticalities that are emerging on the relationship between political economies of welfare, social-health assistance and planning of Public health services.