Stigma
Stigma (person who gambled perspective)

Affected others lack help

Another form of discrimination is the limited information and support available for family members and others affected by someone’s gambling, including children. Affected others discuss the challenge in finding resources or advice specifically designed to assist them. The quality of available support is also a concern, including the scarcity of self-help groups for affected family members, insufficient long-term support options, and a lack of visibility regarding the support that is available.

My dad never got any professional support and didn’t go to GamCare and wasn’t aware, wasn’t aware of GambleAware or these other charities. Neither was I. Neither was my brother. Neither was my mom. Never been aware. Never accessed them. Even though I work in the space now for the past two years. Still never accessed them. My brother has never accessed them. We probably, we probably should. It would be reasonable. I think if it was any other addiction or any of the harm it would be very reasonable. But clearly, there’s differences in perception and perhaps stigma and shame and guilt, and all these factors perhaps all mean the same thing as well in some ways.

At present there are more GA groups and there GamAnon groups, which baffles me because in our local cities there is at least one GA group per city, but there’s only one GamAnon group for the entire like district… And when you consider the fact that there are probably more affected others per one gambler… I feel like that’s possibly a stigma issue.

[Son] had to wait quite a long time for his counselling. … I think he’s gone about five or six weeks now, again a year after the event, but he finishes next week because it’s the youth programme and he’s 18 next Friday. So they won’t give him any further than next Tuesday…They’re not sure at the moment or haven’t been told if they’re going to refer him over to an adult version of a trauma counselling session.

Nothing happened for the kids. I kept ringing other charities asking. I got some help through GamCare, a really good lady that talked to me for quite a few weeks. My daughter got thankfully offered something through work where she got a number of weeks free and then some discounted counselling with the same person, which has helped her.

My son was the one who kept saying he didn’t need it the most. Which obviously then kept me thinking, well maybe you do but he was the one that was the hardest to get help for and like I said, we did get like social services or the school because he was a school at that time just doing his– had he just done? No, he’d have been just going into his GCSE year, I think. Anyway, he got a little bit of stuff come through from school. But again, there wasn’t hardly anything, hardly anything and it was just weird. He was such a different– it was amazing.

It was a different experience, but I got less– I wasn’t looking for offers of help because I’m in a different position now. So obviously I knew a lot, I was a lot wiser to what I needed to do or people I needed to speak to or where I needed to go for help but it’s still not really easy because there was still a couple of charities that I know people from really well that I’d rung and asked specific questions and they said, “Do you know what? I actually don’t know if we have someone that can answer that question,” so I don’t know. It’s just that– but you could probably say that for everything. You could probably say for all, all addictions, all charities, all people affected, there’s never– if things were perfect, these things wouldn’t happen, and we are really trying hard to make better situations out there for everyone who goes through the same thing, and maybe, hopefully, in time we will be able to. I know there’s definite holes in our trying still that we need to fill. Because, as I say, he didn’t get any help at all.

Julie

I think it’s unfair for me to comment about treatment but for us it wasn’t effective. It wasn’t until we got to GamAnon where we actually spoke with people who got what we were talking about. We isolated ourselves. We never spoke to anyone about it. We carried it all on our own and then when we got GamAnon and were surrounded by people who had that genuine empathy for us rather than that insincere sympathy is when our recovery started.

People said that there are established safeguarding procedures and protocols in place for children affected by drug and alcohol-related harms, but similar protective measures are absent for those impacted by gambling-related harms.

And that’s what makes me really feel about the children that are experiencing gambling harm right now. I mean for alcohol and drugs, and there are things, there are established sort of understanding of safeguarding and the need for safeguarding so you can go and speak to your GP and your GP might organize something with social care. And if it’s serious, they might contact the police and do something and there might be sort of, you know, social care or family care you know, that’s taking a family approach and helping to build a relationship and help the person with the addiction and also help the person and the family members too. That isn’t the case with gambling.

I think also the other thing is to think about is whether to call the police. I remember the police being called on my dad about a year before he passed away due to domestic violence at home and the police came and me and my mum and my brother didn’t say anything. Once they came, the police knew what had been happening. They obviously had the message from the people who handled the phones, so they knew that there’d been something going on. They took my dad away, and when they asked for a statement, we never said anything because we thought about how it might affect my dad’s job and all of these things and maybe in retrospect, we shouldn’t have. I don’t really know.

I don’t think your child should be making these decisions, especially one that’s so emotionally connected. I think that’s sort of a real risk of perhaps Stockholm. You’re a psychologist, you’ll know more than me but the Stockholm Syndrome, if that is what I thought of and probably that’s not the right one, but to think that, you know, this is an abusive relationship, but there is love there as well.

Kishan

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