Stigma
Stigma (person who gambled perspective)

Gambling is not treated like other harmful activities

Repeatedly affected others highlight the differences in how society and governments address gambling compared to other addictions like alcohol or drug use. They note less stringent regulations and insufficient support across health, education, and financial sectors. This unequal treatment by government fuels stigma, suggesting gambling issues are personal failures and those affected are not deserving of help. Affected others often felt like unseen casualties of this.

Affected others say that policies and services for gambling harm should mirror those for other addictions, emphasising public education, accessible support, and a shift in societal attitudes to treat gambling addiction more seriously and equitably.

People just treat it so separately to drug and alcohol addiction. If there could be a societal change where actually people put those things all on the same level. Even things like in work, people talk about, oh, I love gambling. I’ve never spoken up there about the problems I’ve been through. I just think you wouldn’t get someone in work just talking in the same way about drinking is great.

At the end of the day, we’ve got to realise it’s an illness. I think people quite easily get alcoholism and drug addiction because they see that it’s a chemical… Acknowledging that it’s a mental illness. That it’s not just something that people do because they’re evil people, but because it is an actual illness like any addiction that is causing the problem.

When I go onto The Priory site, do not see– Gambling addiction is mentioned, but it’s not signposted in the way alcoholism and drug addiction and eating disorders, that’s where The Priory makes all their money, it’s drug, food and alcohol…I’m sure they’ll jump on the bandwagon when they realize there’s lots of money to be made. At the moment, gambling addiction, I feel is almost like the poor relative, it sits under the big three, and I think that gives it more power.

I understand that there’s lots of people who feel that if it’s anything to do with your mental health… and we haven’t overcome as a society. I think gambling is even more taboo than some of those other stigmas.

Some said there were limited support options available for individuals struggling with gambling difficulties.

In Northern Ireland when we were really trying to find support, I felt like there were things in England or in mainland UK anyway that we just didn’t have here. In terms of actual physical centres, I think was the– is it like Gordon Moody, looking for things like that. I know, is it in Manchester, you have a big new shiny support centre? If there was something like that here, that really would’ve changed our lives.

Research

People say the absence of comprehensive research quantifying the harm caused by gambling, especially in comparison to well-documented harms of products like tobacco and alcohol, highlights a significant gap in understanding the full impact of gambling on individuals and society.

This is sort of with my medical, scientific, mathematical and all sort of analysis and logical mind is that we don’t understand the significance of gambling harm. We go on about talking about it’s a public health issue, public health crisis or it’s a really bad problem. But whenever we – whenever scientists and decision makers or health care professionals want to understand an issue, they want to know how bad is it compared to other issues. So, for instance, we have lots of numbers about how tobacco is really bad for you. We know how many lives it takes. We know how difficult and how damaging it is to a person’s health while they’re living it, so they can get COPD, for example, and that reduces their quality of life. What isn’t understood or ever talked about or appreciated or you know, I don’t see anyone ever talking about it in the UK or many countries, actually.

I think New Zealand and Australia are the only two countries that I have actually seen taking a public health approach and started to answer these questions is to talk about how much quality of life is lost through gambling harm. So, we have it for all sorts of diseases, all sort of risk factors like I said for smoking, for alcohol, for drug use, for cannabis, every single thing there are, you know, there is research going on to say how bad is each thing on the population. This is how much quality of life it takes away. There is no way at the moment to appreciate the sort of experience of my life.

Kishan

Workplace

Some affected others point to the absence of workplace legislation and policies specifically for people struggling with gambling, in contrast to the existing policies for drug and alcohol issues. The lack of such policies for gambling means individuals may feel unable to discuss their difficulties with employers for fear of judgment.

It’s only very recently so what, almost three and a half years into still trying to understand why he had become addicted and been one of those individuals who had become addicted that we found out that he actually has got adult ADHD. And he was now able to have that discussion with his employer. And I think his employer again had been fairly responsive to that. But, you know, if I would probably say maybe one thing, I think if his employer earlier on had understood about mental health as part of their processes, they might have been able to help him with his ADHD a long, long while ago, and he’s still trying to address the ADHD issue today. So, to me, you know, there is a link between all of these things and performance.

And as someone who has been responsible for running whole organizations and for someone who has been responsible for overseeing policy development, I know in a number of those policies, particularly around performance, particularly around other aspects, I’m not too sure there’s been as good a focus on mental health or disabilities. I know that’s improving because I’ve seen that written into policies. But again, quite often a lot of people talk about alcohol or talk about drugs in policies. Very few talk about gambling or gaming in policies, and I have incorporated the word gaming because actually gaming is also very similar in design as we all know that has an impact. So, it was an interesting point.

I think maybe the point I’m trying to get across here is that trying to encourage openness is important by the employer, and this is back to your point about the stigma, people I know when I’ve spoken to others, when I’ve spoken to them in our I go to GamAnon rooms, so obviously I can’t comment specifically what is discussed. But when I talk about openness, you can imagine that some people feel very worried about being open because they just do not know how the organization is going to respond and they are fearful of it. And that is something that’s got to be addressed because that would benefit the organization and institution as much as it will benefit the individual.

John #2

Coroners

Others said that coroners generally did not acknowledge gambling as a contributing factor in death records. This lack of recognition in official documentation can hides impact of gambling on deaths, leaving a significant aspect of the individual’s struggles unaddressed in public and health records.

My dad died at 52. In the coroner’s report they wrote diabetes, cirrhosis, and smoking. I remember reading that and thinking, yep, fair enough. And I reflect on it nowadays thinking why wasn’t gambling included? Gambling was a huge part of stress effecting the diabetes, effecting the smoking, causing its own death, causing death in its own way through the stress of the gambling, the sort of adrenalin effect of gambling. That’s not good for the heart. That’s not good for the body but also going to work for 12 hours and to be sleeping four hours a day. That’s also not good for the heart. That’s not being appreciated.

Because we keep gambling addiction as this almost nice addiction. It’s not– You don’t see the harm until somebody puts a noose around their neck. Even then, we know that coroners still do not report on gambling suicide, as they should. One of the panels that I was asked to sit on, was to help educate coroners in how they report. Then, we found that I was probably better suited over on the research panel, so they moved me.

It’s even down to the coroner’s courts, understanding that they can’t just take a suicide note that someone was depressed because of financial difficulties. There needs to be so much more deep digging into people’s lives. We say one person every day kills themselves, because of gambling. It’s so much bigger than that. It’s not just men. It’s always seen as a male dominated addiction, but I think during COVID, the aftermath will be, how many women have been hooked in through —

I think with women they come at us with, “Oh, come online, and there’s this wonderful online community, and you can chat to people and make friends, and don’t be lonely. While you’re waiting to play your 99 pence bingo card with your buy one, get one free. Here, have a go on these slot machines.” It’s the slot machines that I feel are the biggest trigger for people.

There’s still not. It is awful, I think until it is an absolute pandemic, people are not going to take notice. They still feel it’s something, “Oh, don’t do it then. Don’t keep gambling.” It is like alcohol, it is everywhere. It is there 24/7. I think it’s definitely going to kill a lot of people, and especially, the young, because young kids now, they know how to use mobile phones before they can talk.

Their dopamine receptors have already been bombarded with colourful images and sounds, and maybe it’s even about we need to be more educated about dopamine. That some of us are more susceptible and some of us aren’t. [son] is very susceptible to any change in his dopamine. [Younger son], I don’t even know if he’s got any dopamine, he’s that– there’s no– They’re that different.

I don’t know, do we need to be more educated about why people become addicts, so that we can see it, talk about it more, so that it becomes normalized? I honestly don’t know what the answer is to that, but I do feel we need to normalize the discussion around it.

Michelle

Criminal justice

Others express concerns regarding their interactions with the criminal justice system, particularly noting a lack of understanding and appropriate response to gambling difficulties by the police force.

He just looked awful, and he just looked like defeated…. The police were asking if he’d taken any drugs, how bad the debt was. And it was weird what the police said and it’s kind of always stuck in both of our minds that they said, “how bad is the debt?” And he said, “a couple of thousand pounds” and they said, “all this upset over a little bit of money”, or something like that, that’s what they said. And that was a bit strange.

Lived experience peer support is such a valuable part of our recovery. I can’t emphasise that enough. You can take the most highly trained counsellors, therapists, doctors, whatever it was, in our experience they did not work for our situation. And our doctor put our son on medication and when he lowered his dosage he said it doesn’t mean to say that you can gamble again does it. What a thing to say to somebody. There was no empathy there whatsoever. We had the police round on three or four occasions. They were great but had no idea what to say or do. All they were doing was just looking at it as a safeguarding issue, and if he was safe and we were safe, their job was done. And that was no criticism of the police. It’s just a lack of understanding.

Get Support

If you feel like you need support or someone to talk to about your own or someone else’s gambling, there are several organisations who can offer help, support and answer any questions you may have.

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