Birches Health highlighted in New York Times story on compulsive collecting
Birches Health was featured with a mention and quote in this week's New York Times story about compulsive card collecting, repacks and "breaking." Michael Salfino, a journalist for The Athletic, detailed the rise and dangers of these new parts of the card collecting community.
As Birches has explained before, these new forms of acquiring cards involve elements of risk and chance that are nearly indistinguishable from gambling. On a regular basis, collectors have been sharing how quickly their hobby spiraled out of control, reaching levels of spend that they could not afford.
Salfino expands in the article:
"…For some, there is no escaping the financial cost or compensating for it with non-financial benefits. In January, a man posted on Facebook that he spent $244,000 on breaks.
“You’ll never get 20 percent of your money even if you are the luckiest human in the world,” he wrote. “It was a problem. Kinda funny not one person I was spending all that money on hit me up asking how my day was after I stopped getting in breaks. 98 percent of the relationships in the breaker/consumer community are transactional; don’t lie to yourself, they aren’t your homie. Never had an issue with the casino or the book. I’m a junkie and I have been sober for almost 10 years so I know it’s there but I had to see the data on paper to understand the magnitude of what was happening. It’s okay to acknowledge a problem and it’s okay to do something about it.”
If your participation in breaks has exceeded your budget and you find it’s difficult to rein it in, help is available. Birches Health, a gambling addiction specialist that accepts major insurance, says: “Sports card addiction is similar to sports betting addiction and gambling addiction. However, it’s not recognized by the DSM-5. The book only lists gambling disorder, which doesn’t include sports card trading. Birches recommends cognitive behavior therapy that focuses on thinking rationally about behavioral problems and the benefits of behaving differently.
“Sports card collecting is a harmless hobby for some individuals. But it can develop into a serious addiction when the collector is at risk of losing everything. This compulsive behavior motivates the individual to keep collecting more despite the financial and personal outcomes. Treatment for sports card addiction is the same as for gambling addiction.”
