ICAD Opens Portugal's First Public Gambling-Addiction Unit in Lisbon on Thursday 19 June 2026 — Treatment Demand Climbed 118% From 358 Patients in 2023 to 782 in 2025

The Instituto para os Comportamentos Aditivos e as Dependências (Institute for Addictive Behaviours and Dependencies — ICAD) opens Portugal's first publicly funded clinic dedicated to the treatment of perturbação de jogo a dinheiro (gambling disorder) on Thursday 19 June 2026 in Lisbon, the institute's president Joana Teixeira confirmed to wire service Lusa on Tuesday. The Unidade de Intervenção no Jogo de Lisboa (Lisbon Gambling Intervention Unit) is the institute's response to a doubling of treatment demand inside two calendar years — a trend the SNS now has to absorb from the National Health Service's general addiction line.

Teixeira pegged the demand jump at 118 percent: 358 patients reached ICAD with a gambling-disorder reason for consultation in 2023, against 782 in 2025. The institute also released the best Portuguese prevalence figures it currently holds — a 0.6 percent population rate for gambling addiction and a 1.1 percent rate for problem gambling. Teixeira flagged that no robust national epidemiological dataset existed for the disorder prior to 2025, and that one of the unit's secondary mandates will be longitudinal monitoring to fill that gap.

An outpatient unit at Espaço Jovem until the Restelo building is delivered

The clinic opens in ambulatory mode only — no inpatient beds — and will provisionally operate out of the Espaço Jovem (Youth Space) in central Lisbon, a facility ceded by the Câmara Municipal de Lisboa (Lisbon City Council) under what Teixeira described as a "very sensitive" administrative arrangement. The permanent installation is an ICAD-owned building in Restelo, currently under works, and the unit will migrate there once construction finishes.

Referrals will flow in through two pipelines: the Serviço Nacional de Saúde (SNS, National Health Service) and ICAD's existing nationwide network of Centros de Respostas Integradas (Integrated Response Centres). Patients do not need to walk in off the street — the gambling unit is positioned as a specialised referral endpoint rather than a primary-access point. The initial cohort is restricted to adults, although Teixeira noted the institute will keep the door open to extending the service to adolescents and to other behavioural-addiction profiles once the demand and clinical pathway stabilise.

A multidisciplinary team — including an accountant

The opening staffing model is uncommon in the SNS's addiction services. The team combines psychiatrists, psychologists, a social worker and an contabilista (accountant), with the accountant added specifically to address the debt cascades that frequently accompany pathological gambling. Coordination falls to clinical psychologist Cristina Marques; the unit's design draws on input from psychologist Pedro Hubert and psychiatrists João Marques and João Reis, all Portuguese specialists working in the field.

Clinical delivery will mix individual and group sessions. Teixeira expects three to four therapy groups to run in parallel, each capped at 14 patients, with a deliberate family-systemic component layered on top. "We have a family component associated, which is fundamental — it is a systemic intervention," she told Lusa, observing that family members are typically the ones who flag the most severe cases. The model was built in close consultation with peer programmes in Spain and England, where dedicated public gambling-disorder units have run for several years and produced the evidence base ICAD is now adapting to the Portuguese clinical population.

The patient profile: men aged 15 to 34

The dominant demographic ICAD is seeing is male and young: most current patients fall between 15 and 34 years old. Teixeira underlined a high level of psychiatric comorbidity attached to the gambling-disorder population — depression and suicidal ideation are the most frequent overlays — a clinical pattern that justifies the psychiatry-heavy staffing model rather than a purely psychotherapeutic one. The unit will also run an internal research and outcomes-monitoring arm, with the brief of continuously evaluating treatment effectiveness and feeding the result back into the protocol.

A videogame-addiction programme follows in Porto on 29 June

ICAD is pairing the Lisbon launch with a second behavioural-addiction service due to open on 29 June 2026, this one for dependência de videojogos (videogame addiction). That programme will be hosted inside an existing ICAD unit in Porto and is targeted primarily at adolescents, with referrals routed through GP family doctors (médicos de família) or through ICAD's internal pipeline. Teixeira said the comorbidity pattern in the videogame cohort differs from gambling: anxiety and mood disorders dominate the psychiatric overlay rather than depression and suicidality, which she attributed to the younger age structure of the patient population.

The institute is leaving room to cross-load the two services later: the Lisbon unit may eventually take videogame-addiction patients, and the Porto programme may eventually extend to jogo a dinheiro cases. For now, the geography-and-modality split is intentional, allowing each team to specialise on the cleanest possible clinical signal before scope-creep enters the protocol.

What this means for residents and expats in Portugal

For residents and expats covered by the SNS — including those on the número de utente assigned at registration with their local health centre — the new unit becomes a no-out-of-pocket referral pathway for what has historically been a paid private-clinic problem in Portugal. There is no walk-in eligibility yet, so a GP appointment or an existing addiction-services follow-up is the gateway. The geographic concentration in Lisbon is a real constraint for users outside the metropolitan area, although the ambulatory format and group-therapy backbone leave open the prospect of telehealth follow-ups once the Restelo facility is operational. ICAD has not yet published a target patient capacity, with Teixeira saying only that the group-therapy structure should let the unit absorb a "significant" caseload from day one.