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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.