How the program was built, and from what

Silex's 90 days were written from published clinical material and research, not from a marketing brief. This page lists what they were built from so you can check the work — and so you can go to the primary sources directly if you'd rather not pay for an app.

The shape of the program

90 authored days, one lesson at a time, in three phases:

A lapse doesn't reset anything. It routes you to a Reset day built around relapse-prevention material on the abstinence violation effect — the finding that how a person interprets a slip predicts whether it becomes a full return to gambling more reliably than the slip itself does.

The sources

Clinical treatment material

• Nancy M. Petry's cognitive-behavioural work on pathological gambling — the standard CBT framework for gambling disorder: functional analysis of gambling episodes, trigger identification, coping-skills training and planned alternative activities. Petry's treatment manual and trials are the backbone of Phase 2.
• The UCLA Gambling Studies Program patient workbook — a free, publicly available self-help workbook. Several of the day-level exercise formats (trigger inventories, urge logs, decision worksheets) follow its structure.
• Motivational Interviewing (William R. Miller & Stephen Rollnick) — why the program asks rather than lectures, and why your own stated reasons for quitting are resurfaced back to you instead of the app supplying motivation.
• Relapse Prevention (G. Alan Marlatt & Judith R. Gordon, 1985) — high-risk-situation planning, the abstinence violation effect, and the design rule that a slip must never zero your history.
• SMART Recovery and Gamblers Anonymous — two different traditions, both pointed to inside the app, because the evidence does not support telling someone there is only one route.

How gambling products are engineered

• Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton University Press, 2012) — the ethnography behind Phase 1. The "machine zone", the design of continuous play, and the industry's own language about time-on-device.
• Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation (2021) — the pleasure–pain balance framing used to explain why the first weeks feel worse before they feel better.
• Allen Carr's method — the argument that the "relief" a bet provides is the withdrawal it created, adapted to gambling rather than smoking.

Measurement

• The Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI), from the Canadian Problem Gambling Index (Ferris & Wynne, 2001) — nine items over a 12-month window, the instrument behind both the app's intake and the self-check on this site. It is a screening tool: it estimates risk, it does not diagnose anyone.

What we're careful about

• The program is not a clinical trial. Silex applies material from evidence-based treatment; that is not the same as Silex itself having been trialled. Nobody has run a randomised study on this app, and until somebody has, we won't imply otherwise or quote an effectiveness figure.
• Screening is not diagnosis. Every risk score in the app and on this site carries the same line: this isn't a diagnosis, it's a snapshot of risk based on a standard self-check.
• Helplines are re-verified every release, because the numbers do change — the US national line changed in January 2026.
• The program is in English only for now, and its self-exclusion and debt guidance is deepest for the United States and the United Kingdom.

If you spot something in the program that misrepresents a source, write to support@trysilex.com — that is a bug and it gets fixed like one.