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Ian

Ian is currently unemployed. He was repeatedly sexually assaulted from the age of 15 over an 18-month period. He started gambling to try and cope with the trauma that he was experiencing. He was gambling at high-street bookmakers because that was the only environment where he felt safe. His gambling continued to escalate over the ensuing years.

After a long period of time, he received a large amount of compensation money following the court case of his abuser. He says his mental health deteriorated extremely quickly during that time. He describes isolating himself in his room gambling because he was unable to socialise with anyone including his family, and within a short period of time he had gambled the compensation money online. 

Ian entered a 14-week residential gambling treatment programme. Since then, he has made numerous friends through meeting others in the lived experience community. Ian would like to see changes made within the criminal justice system including more understanding and awareness of gambling addiction, and how gambling-related harms are addressed.

Contributions

It’s about meeting new people. If I’ve got anything in common with them, can they give me something for my recovery, because I’m not going to like everybody that I see, but the people that I engage with and everything like that, I do like to become close to and they’re close to me, but we need to do that all the time. As long as we’re building, as long as we’re still learning about ourselves, then we’re still moving forward, and that’s what I want to do every day. Every day I want to move one step forward.

Recovery
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We had this conversation around money, and he said, “Me and your sister would only ever give you money that we knew wouldn’t affect us as a family.” He said, “Because we knew you would probably give us it back at some point but never the time that you said you was going to give us it back.” He said that “It was just frustrating because we didn’t want to talk to you about it because we knew you would lie to us.” This is how we’re conversating. He said, “There was no point in trying to say, ‘Ian, have you got a gambling addiction,’ because you would have lied to us because your lies sometimes were laughable, but you actually believed them all.”
Just conversations that I’ve had with my family, and obviously, learning about the addiction when I was in Gordon Moody, and then coming out, and then listening to stories that we talk about quite regularly when we’re all together. I would say my friends always knew probably I had an addiction, but they accepted me for what I was, but my family, there was a lot of frustration there with my family because they knew I’d got an addiction. They knew I didn’t want to deal with it. They knew all I wanted to ever do was try and win that big pot.

Ian
Harm
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The deeper it goes, the less you do with people. I could engage with somebody tomorrow I didn’t know and really have conversations with them.
If I was in my addiction, probably within two or three weeks, the times of our meeting would decrease, the hours would decrease. If it was an hour, I’d say, “Oh, I’ve got half an hour today, that’s all,” because your time is important when you’re in addiction, this gambling addiction. Your time is important because you may miss that one dog that’s won, that was favourite. You might not get another favourite for another three races, so your time is really precious.
If people try and take that away from you when you’re in this addiction, yes, you have mood swings because you don’t want to engage with people because you don’t want to miss that favourite winning or that odds that you’ve been waiting for two to three days. Unfortunately, that’s how our brains train for that particular time, where engaging with people unless you’re in a bookmakers environment, is just something you don’t do. You wouldn’t do it.

Ian
Harm
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For me, this is why I do the Big Step. I do the Big Step because it is based around gambling advertisements within football. I believe there should be a watershed. I don’t think there should be any gambling adverts till after 9:00 PM. It’s common knowledge. It’s not even rocket science. You don’t even have to go and research it. The morning advertisements are for the single parents who’ve got kids at school sitting there doing nothing, and obviously, weekend advertisements is for every Joey who wants to bet on a football game. That’s basically that in a nutshell. There should be a watershed at 9:00 PM, where before an advert can be shown I’d say like 9:00 till 6:00 AM in the morning, where normal people will be thinking about going to bed or settling down for the night and everything. So it’s not going to be, they may see one before they go to sleep, but you turn your TV on at seven o’clock in the morning and you’ll see a gambling advert within the first hour. For me, personally, there should be a watershed and it should be 9:00 PM onwards like they’ve done with other things that they’re not allowed to show. Why is gambling advertisement any different when it’s a product that can basically kill people? It’s common knowledge. One person a day dies through gambling addiction. That’s 365 deaths a year. When are we going to start taking it seriously? 365 people die every year through an addiction that people think it’s not an addiction. When is it classed as an addiction then? when 1,000 people die a year? Yes, certainly a watershed at 9:00 PM.

Ian
Change
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I think if you go to your GP and talk about gambling addiction, that’s another part where we’ll probably go, they’ll just put it in Google, and send you to GA. I do think that maybe GP surgeries and GP doctors maybe need to have a bit more about gambling addiction and where to signpost people. If it’s severe gambling addiction, they can signpost them to GA care wherever, Gordon Moody even. I think there has to be something where people commonly know about it. Because I wouldn’t have known about Gordon Moody unless I put in my Google search “gambling addiction”. Maybe this has to be advertised in GP surgeries, in dental surgeries.

I’d like to see more advertisement around gambling addiction where the general public visit sometimes libraries even. Something in a library, “Do you think you’ve got a gambling addiction?” They do it with drugs. They do it with alcohol. You can go into a library, see a poster. I’ve never seen anything with gambling addiction, so I think public places would be good. I think GPs should be given a bit more knowledge around gambling addiction rather than just Google search like we do.

Ian
Change
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For me, the most important thing is affordability checks. There has to be affordability checks when people gamble online. I think somebody who sets up an online account, they should have their photo given to the regulator, they should have proof of income and you shouldn’t be allowed to spend any more than 20% of your yearly income. That’s my personal opinion, 20% for somebody who would gamble every day. Yes, I was thinking, I think it’s quite reasonable 20%. Some people will say as low as 5% of the income should be taken, but certainly, affordability checks is the most important thing that these regulators have to be made accountable for. Because had they done an affordability check on me in 2011, I was on benefits, but I spent over £100,000 in four months. Would I have been allowed to spend all that in four months? Probably not.

Ian
Change
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“Obviously, 2019, I was arrested. I’d committed a crime against the football club that I was involved in voluntary. I stole £2,500 from that club through player subs and getting money from parents saying that I was going to buy a new tracksuit for the kids and everything. That obviously never materialized, so, in May 2019, I was arrested. I was charged with theft by employee and went through the whole court process. Ended up getting two-year Probation Service. I was tagged for the first three months of that, and that’s when I started reaching out.
I started talking, I spoke to the police officers about my addiction. When I first met my probation officer, I spoke to her about, “”I believe I’m in this gambling addiction,”” and that’s when I found Gordon Moody. I went online trying to find out how am I going to get this help because I already knew that I’d got two years to get through without doing anything criminal because if I did anything criminal, I was going to jail. There was no other way. I had to find a way of getting through them two years and also trying to get away from gambling, I guess because that was the only thing that was going to send me to jail.”

Ian
Show text version

I’m engaging with people who are six years out of treatment, but I needed that to stabilize my recovery for when I came out and I’ve made some really good friends. We’re then good friends now and started doing the Big Step last year. I did the Big Step walk. We did Gretna Green to Wembley Stadium in 10 days. We’ve done one this year already heading forward to Glasgow. We’ve got another one pencilled in Manchester to Liverpool in July, but for me, it’s about meeting new people. If I’ve got anything in common with them, can they give me something for my recovery, because I’m not going to like everybody that I see, but the people that I engage with and everything like that, I do like become close to and they’re close to me, but we need to do that all the time. As long as we’re building, as long as we’re still learning about ourselves, then we’re still moving forward, and that’s what I want to do every day. Every day I want to move one step forward.

Ian
Recovery
Show text version

In May 2019 I was arrested. I was charged with theft by my employee and went through the whole court process. Ended up getting two-year Probation Service. I was tagged for the first three months of that, and that’s when I started reaching out. I started talking, I spoke to the police officers about my addiction. When I first met my probation officer, I spoke to her about, “I believe I’m in this gambling addiction,” and that’s when I found Gordon Moody. I went online trying to find out how am I going to get this help because I already knew that I’d got two years to get through without doing anything criminal because if I did anything criminal, I was going to jail. There was no other way. I had to find a way of getting through them two years and also trying to get away from gambling, I guess because that was the only thing that was going to send me to jail. Nothing else.

Ian
Recovery
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I was just doing anything that I wanted really, yes, at the time I was being abused. I wasn’t allowed to tell anybody because he’d already told me what he was going to do. He targeted the people that was my family, and so, for me, every time he abused me, the only way I could suppress that is by going and gambling and being in an environment where I felt safe in. I used to go to in the bookie shops even though I was only 15, and again, not really challenged on my age, at that particular time, but it was like my safe place. I started to enjoy being in there rather than socialising with friends even, and that’s, I’m still only 15 years of age, don’t forget. I was self-isolating myself already at the age of 15, to society because the only place I felt safe at that particular time and throughout the whole two years I was being abused, was in the bookmakers.

Ian
Gambling Experiences
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Initially, when I first gambled online, I used to just gamble on what I would gamble on in the bookmakers. It would just be greyhound racing and horse racing. They were the only things that I would gamble on. Then obviously, going back to when I got that money, as the thousands of pounds were dwindling away, I’m trying to keep this aura that I’m still okay, I’ve still got plenty of money, and in hindsight, everything is going down at a rapid rate. I then basically gambled on anything. The thought process changed immensely. It would be table tennis, it would be virtual racing. It would go to tennis. I would bet on golf on a Thursday for tournaments that ended on Sundays. I would say within a very short period of time, and when I say short, maybe two to three weeks of me finding online gambling and having this large amounts of money, the thought process of how I gambled changed rapidly. It wasn’t just about horse racing and greyhounds because they finished at a certain time, and I still wanted to gamble because I might have lost £4,000 that day. The thought process quickly changed the quicker I was losing this money.

Ian
Gambling Companies

I was awarded over £100,000 in compensation basically, and like I say, my mental health deteriorated. Before the court case, I tried ending my life, and after the court case, I tried to end my life. I was finding it really difficult to socialize with anybody, including my family. I was stuck in my room at home. I had this large compensation money, and this is where I found online gambling. I found online gambling, and unfortunately, I ended up losing all my compensation money within four months.

Gambling Experiences

Find the best help that suits you. There’s plenty of opportunity to get the help. There’re organizations that will give you one-to-ones on a weekly basis, there’s residential treatment programmes, if you can go into them, all there waiting to help you out. There is life after gambling. There is ways that you can stop gambling, but you’ve got to have it in your heart, and you’ve got to be in the right space at the right time… My life’s so much better now I can seek help. Get the help you deserve because gambling will only ruin you.

Recovery

Like I say, for me, the most passionate thing is the criminal justice system. That is the thing we need to tap into and we need to get people more aware of it. I’ll still say this in 10 years’ time openly. For me, it’s all about the criminal justice system information and helping these people that have committed crime through an addiction that nobody understands or don’t want to understand. I think we need to get that word out there, what this addiction is about. That’s really important for me, for my recovery, and to give something back to an industry that’s done me so much harm.

Change

I was awarded over £100,000 in compensation basically, and like I say, my mental health deteriorated. Before the court case, I tried ending my life, and after the court case, I tried to end my life. I was finding it really difficult to socialize with anybody, including my family. I was stuck in my room at home. I had this large compensation money, and this is where I found online gambling and unfortunately, I ended up losing all my compensation money within four months.

Harm

I guess 2011, up until I accepted my addiction in 2019, it was just a rollercoaster. Every day was, if I had no money, it was about trying to find money. If I lost that money, it was trying to find more money. Then like the normal things that we’ve all done is bank loans, payday loans, they all followed. Then obviously, as everybody knows, your credit rating soon deteriorates when you’re taking the loans and then not repaying them. That cycle of about eight years, I guess, is when the addiction really hit me, and it started to hit me at the worst possible time in my life.

Harm

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