Unbeknownst to me at the time, because he hid it quite well, he started gambling again…For me, it was like I was living with this new person, this is out of control. He started to get more down, more angry, making it like it’s all your fault. It’s your fault that I’m doing this, because so arguments would start and then as a result of the argument, it was like, “Well, I’m sick of arguing with you, so now I’m going to go out.” That was the excuse to get out, basically.

It was like, you’re living, it’s a bit like having a bereavement actually. When you’re grief-stricken, I think that’s what it was like… Grief for your relationship, grief for everything really. Grief for your even sense of safety as well because it was very unsafe. Sometimes he’d be so out there that you’d be frightened what he was going to do next to you as well. In fairness, he never actually hit me or anything but the threat of it, and if you saw me, and saw him, he’s quite big and I’m quite small. It’s like the threats of things going that might happen to you was more scary than what would happen to you.

I couldn’t have him back in the house because he was too up and down, his moods were too unstable. I couldn’t cope with him in the house. It was only a tiny house. Anything that went off, you couldn’t just stomp off to another room somewhere. There was nowhere to hide really if you needed to get away. I think anybody who’s been in that situation with a partner who either is mentally not well off … well, anybody that’s out of control, it is really difficult to be able to contain that within a home setting.

When I met [husband], at first I didn’t realise that he was a gambler. As we carried on with the relationship a little bit, he felt that he had to tell me that he was or that he had been. My first instinct was to be relieved about it, to be honest, at first, because I’ve been in relationships with alcoholics, I’ve been in relationships with people who use drugs. Gambling to me was like, well, that’s the least of the least.

I very quickly found out that actually, it’s a very destructive addiction to have… Not long after we got married, he just went back to the gambling. I witnessed first-hand how devastating it is, how devastating it can be in a very, very short space of time within the year. It was just horrific. It was a shock, to be honest.

When I met my now husband, I had no real background of understanding of gambling, in a way. Although having said that, when I look back now, in my family, gambling was probably quite prevalent, but I didn’t see it that anybody had a real problem with gambling…As a child growing up, everybody had a bet on the Grand National or something. It was part of culture really, but nobody really talked about it being a problem for anybody.

We were trying all sorts of ways to get [husband] access to his family, to his children, because he’s been denied access to his kids. I think that was the catalyst, really. The more we pushed for that and the more that didn’t happen, I think that was the catalyst for [partner] to start regressing a bit… I suppose gradually [husband] started going a little bit down in mood, feeling a bit more depressed about things, a bit fed up about things. He gave up his job, he just walked out of a job…Gradually, that just got worse because once he came out of that job and he didn’t have another job, it was like that mood dipped, it went down, down, down.

Then I was a bit scared then, because I’ve been in situations in the past where I’ve been in debt, and there had been lots of problems, and so suddenly now, I’m getting into debt now because we didn’t have enough money to go cover things. It was like then having to go cap in hand for all these different organisations saying, I can’t pay this, I can’t pay that, how are we going to do this, how are we going to do that? I have to say, the Citizens Advice Bureau were amazing. They really helped me, because they took on all the phone calls.

The police asked if I would take him home. He had nowhere else to go at that point. I did take him off that night and spent the whole night watching him, watching what he was doing. I think the nurse in me, as well because I am a retired nurse midwife, and suddenly this guy’s here who’s not well really, he’s really mentally unstable. I’m like, I almost was treating him like a patient really. In the end, it was like he’d gone from being my husband to being my client almost because he wasn’t operating like a husband at that point. He was more of a patient really.

What I was thankful for with that support network was that none of them said get rid of him or keep away from him. I was glad about that really because I had gone somewhere where there were some people there who worked for women’s aid and stuff, and when they were talking about the situation, not my situation, but the situation, it was a case of, “Oh, people can’t change. People never changed their spots. You need to leave them. Or if you’re under threat.” I understand all of that because obviously, they had been in situations where there were people who didn’t and where women were being put in danger, and I get that. I’m not suggesting this to anybody, but I never felt I should get rid of him. I never felt that. Although some people had been saying that, but I never felt that. I just wanted him to get better, to be honest.

I’m not sure that Prozac helped him very much to be honest, but I suppose it did calm him down a bit. It did kind of calm down that mad craziness that was going on. He gave me some space, then I stayed in the house. He went and stayed with friends who very kindly kept him for a few months.

When you are out and about anywhere with a sport going on, you are hounded, hounded to put a bet on. That’s the same for people that are betting online. They get hounded, don’t they? Even when they’re dead, they get hounded.

We go to the football, around every single grand or advert or gambling all around it, it’s just in your face, sponsors on shirts. I refuse to buy any football stuff that has a gambling company on the front of it…We did it for cigarettes, didn’t we? Cigarettes don’t get advertised now…. Gambling advertising to me, needs to be regulated far more than it is, and maybe even restricted to certain times because it’s just constant now.

Start with the big boys and start cutting down the amount of airtime they get, the amount of advertising they get. I know a lot of it’s because of revenue as well, isn’t it? Because the government gets revenue from them in billions. Then you look at something like that lady with Bet365 and you look at what she made this year, you know? That just shows you the scale, doesn’t it, of the problem really. When you look at something like that, you just think, “Wow, billions, millions.” It’s the scale of the problem.

I know thousands of people gamble every week. They wouldn’t consider themselves addicted, but I suggest that there’s far more people that are quietly addicted because they’ll be quietly addicted in their own homes doing it online. They’re not going to join in some survey, are they? They’re sat at home and that’s what I found when I went in the families and friends rooms that a lot of the family members were on the laptop or the mobile and they weren’t part of any great statistics because they were hiding it from everybody.

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.

I didn’t want to tell everybody what was going on, because we’d had this big, lovely romantic meeting in Paris, and we had this big wedding, and it had all been great. I just couldn’t tell anybody, because I thought they’re going to look at me like, well, I don’t know, like some sort of failure, or like some sort of lunatic that you’ve ended up with this person. That was really hard keeping it to yourself. I didn’t tell anybody in my family for ages.

It’s like you feel a shame because you’re in this situation and I’ve got myself into this mess. I always remember [husband] saying one of the worst things that his dad ever told him to do was not to tell anybody. “Don’t tell anybody that you’ve got this problem. Because you’ll never get a job again or you’ll never…” … The more secrets you have to keep, and the worse it gets the most secrets you have to keep. That burden of that is what really does the damage I think in the end. Because it makes you feel you’ve got to deal with it all and you can’t tell anybody.

I think I just got to the point in the end, where I couldn’t cope with the stress. I’d be walking around the streets and just start crying, just crying openly in the street, not even knowing why I was crying. I think people who don’t understand gambling or the way that a gambler operates. If they don’t understand that, they can’t quite understand why you’re feeling the way you’re feeling.

For me, the big deal was, is he going to kill himself, and that was my fear. Is he going to kill himself? Is he going to drive the car over, because he’d be going up over the hills? Is he going to drive his car off the road? What is he going to do? It was living with that constantly in the back of your head, just takes the life over. It does take you life over because you can’t enjoy anything. You can’t really engage with anything…I was battling to stay afloat, really. It was an extremely hard time.

I had bailiffs at the door, I used to sit on the steps and just shout at the bailiffs to go away. All I kept hearing was people saying don’t open the door to them. That’s all I kept hearing them saying. It was an awful, awful time. I think I just got to the point in the end, where it was like I couldn’t cope with the stress.

It did impact his kids. There’s no doubt about that and it’s had long-reaching consequences on his kids. They are all grown up now. They’re all over 30. But, they’ve all got their own little things and even today, it still affects his relationship with his children, and this is years down the line.

My social life became quite narrow really, and because it was kind of this thing about he needed me to be there. He wanted to know what I was doing at every minute of every day, but yet I didn’t know very much about what he was doing at every minute of every day.

The thing that’s always been there though is, that we never do anything that’s associated with gambling. It’s almost like saying if you’re trying to lose weight and you’re dieting, and then somebody came and stuck a cream cake in front of you, or whatever you like, whether it’s crisps or whatever, just said, I’m going to leave that there, just don’t eat it. If you were steely, steely, you’d think, no, I’m not going to eat it. Depending on how strong you felt that day, you wouldn’t eat it.

My husband] started going a little bit down in mood, feeling a bit more depressed about things, a bit fed up about things. He gave up his job, he just walked out of a job. That was a big thing. You’re just like, well, what are you going to do because we’ve got bills to pay, mortgage to pay, and all the rest of it. When he walked out of his job, it was like, what are we going to do now? I was panicking, to be quite honest, what are we going to do?

I was working. I was doing anything really just to get some money to be perfectly honest. I was doing all sorts of jobs because he wasn’t working at that point. I was doing all sorts of things.

You’re so bound up in what they’re doing that you neglect yourself really, and I really did neglect myself. I couldn’t afford to get my haircut to be fair, but I did nothing for me. I was doing nothing for me at all at that point. Everything was about him.

I started to get depressed and down. It started affecting me then. Where before I was feeling quite supportive, and vocal, and we can get through this, and we can do this… I kept thinking in my head, this is the wrong strategy, keep going on at him. It was like, I’ve got to look out for myself, but I couldn’t because I was too worried about what he was doing… For me, my mental health, I never got treated for depression or anything like that, but it was like, I was just sad all the time, and it just used to make me cry.

I knew that he’d had a previous history of mental illness and suicide, that really did freak me out, because it was like every time he went out, I didn’t know where he was and I didn’t know what he was doing. Those times when he went out got longer, so he might go, and he’d disappear for days. I wouldn’t know where he was…. Imagine anybody, if their loved one goes and for days on end, you’re just panic stricken. I lived in this constant state of anxiety all the time.

I was anorexic then in my 20s and when all this blew up with [husband], that happened again, that anorexic and I suppose. I don’t know if I made that clear, but I stopped eating, I stopped looking after myself. It wasn’t an anorexia type of thing, “Oh, I need to lose weight,” because I didn’t, I was quite slim even then. My go-to thing was, “What can I control?” Subconsciously obviously, “What can I control? Well, eating.”

It’s like you’re constantly anxious, you can’t do anything, you can’t settle to anything. The number of times I had to ring the police and report him as a missing person, just simply because he’d been missing for too long, it might be three days that he’d gone.

I was glad that the police forced the issue really. Because what they were saying is, look, we’ve had this guy as a missing person that many times now, with a threat of suicide. He has got to be seen. Fair enough, he wasn’t admitted. I would’ve liked it better if he had been. He wasn’t admitted but at least it meant that he got the ball rolling for some intervention, which was helpful in the end.

The thing that’s always been there though is, that we never do anything that’s associated with gambling… I think it’s really important for people to put strategies in place that they don’t put themselves into situations where they might get tempted to do something, or don’t test themselves by going into places like that, going into the bookies, looking on the phone.

For me, going into the route of family’s room helped me to be accountable as well. It helped me to offload, but it also helped me to be accountable to other people about what I was doing because you do crazy things yourself when you’re involved with somebody who’s completely out of control. You do things that you’re not proud of yourself.

I just felt like I needed a bit of somebody to talk to, really. What I did, in the end, was after all the craziness, I had by that time confided in a few people what was happening because you just have to. Otherwise, it’s just you, isn’t it? I did confide in a few people just to have that support network really, which really helped me.

He got looked after by one set of people. I got looked after by another set of people, and it helped us both really because I think sometimes when you’re in a relationship or you’re married, whether you’re living with someone, people see you like a double act, don’t they?

He went to the cognitive behavioural therapist, who was fantastic, and he was really good with me as well. He met with me a couple of times as well and he was great. He gave [husband] some really good coping strategies just around how he was, and he’s thought patterns, really, how he thought and what he thought. hat what was good, as well, and that really helps, that helped [husband] a lot and in turn helped me.

It’s funny because one of the kids when we’ve been running this charity, one of the kids thought that I was called [husband] and Donna. She didn’t realise I was Donna… I think for us at that time, it was about reclaiming our individuality a bit so that he wasn’t relying on me, I wasn’t relying on him all the time. That was really important to do that I think because otherwise, you just get enmeshed with that, which is what had been happening, really, that we were so together that we couldn’t pull apart really to deal with it, to deal with what we had to deal with.

It’s about how you look after you. You first, them second, because it’s like in an airplane, isn’t? You always have to put your own oxygen mask on first before you help anybody else. To me, it’s about you sorting you out. Then you might be able to support them when they need sorting themselves out.

Just dropping, just to be able to say, “You know what? I’m having a bad day today. I’m really having a bad day today.” Just sit and chat with somebody or– We used to have that and I suppose we used to have that with this little mental health place that they’ve closed it down of course. It’s been shut down over the last few years, but it was a great place because it was a place where people could go who had mental health problems and just be able to sit and chat with each other or if they needed to chat to somebody who was a support worker or someone, then they could do.

Having something like in GP surgeries or places where people are to have that directory specifically for gambling rather than you having to wade through tons of information to find anything. To put into places like surgeries and places where people are likely to go and where people can get help as well because then you’ve got a really ready-made resource really, rather than having to search online.

I think more stuff in schools definitely. Because really these kids are starting…it’s certainly in the amount of exposure they have to things that they probably can’t even quite compute or understand, but yet they’re being fed information that’s going to be harmful to them. I think schools definitely should make a priority that at least there’s somebody going in telling them about the pitfalls of what could go down and maybe at a younger age.

How do you regulate now the number of companies now that there are, I know there’s the big ones, but there’s lots of smaller ones too. How do you regulate all of that now? It’s all out of the bag, isn’t it? I really think that something’s got to happen, you’ve got to do something, and you’ve got to start somewhere. I know a lot of it’s because of revenue as well, isn’t it? Because the government gets revenue from them in billions.

Tighter regulation on advertising, definitely. Taking sponsorship of football shirts definitely, and probably Cricket now as well because they’re into it now, aren’t they, as well, and trying to crack down on these online gambling sites, really.

I think there needs to be more regulation around the companies that are the betting companies. When you are out and about anywhere with a sport going on, you are hounded, hounded to put a bet on. That’s the same for people that are betting online. They get hounded, don’t they? Even when they’re dead, they get hounded… When you listen to [affected others], they were getting stuff from gambling companies long after the loved one had died. Even though they’ve been told that they’d died, it’s that insensitivity, it’s that kind of relentless pursuit of people.