Contributions

After being married for one or two years, they had my brother and I think things were difficult right from then. So, I think my mum was trying to save up for the first house. And I remember so I know from the context of my mum telling me nowadays, like in the last couple of years, the last several years as I got older is that she found it really hard to pay for things like nappies, buy bread at times, buy milk, buy all sorts of essentials that you know that a baby needs. And that’s always where my mum’s head and heart has always been, her two kids, and she really struggled, and I’m not sure how she got through it but, you know, whenever she talks about it she cries and says you know how, how difficult it was and how she wasn’t able to buy the essentials for us and I can’t imagine how that feels for her. I know how emotional she can get about me and my brother, so. And then eventually, I think my mum had saved up by stashing away money and she managed to save enough for a deposit. I think the first time she did that my dad had managed to get into the saving and managed to gamble all of that away, and I would say it wasn’t through my mum’s permission. But I think just to sort of give the cultural context in this sort of dynamic as it was an arranged marriage and still in the sort of the often in these arranged marriages that there can be this sort of patriarchal hierarchy where what the man says in the relationship goes and the female doesn’t really have a say which is really sad, and that’s how it was. And I’m also not sure at what point it became abusive in different ways. But I also know about so there’s sort of that financial abuse that I’ve talked about but there was emotional and physical abuse going on, not just for me, but my mum and my brother as well. And that’s from the beginning to end.

That’s something I just grew up with, you know, I think I’ve always also been told that my brother and my mum have had it harder, and they took the brunt of it I think for different reasons. But I think one of the reasons is that they would try to protect me as I was the youngest one, so they would always put themselves first in any sort of line of attack. So, the first I think 15 years of my life can be sort of just understood by understanding that I lived in a house where there was a constant ongoing, I don’t know, experience of gambling harm and it meant emotional, physical, financial and all sorts of harms.

Kishan
Gambling Experiences

I can understand some of the motivations, and I can perhaps see how things that were stressful and perhaps things were already a cycle so it is quite hard to determine because it just seemed like it was never ending, a cycle of stress and gambling causing financial pressures and stress, leading to more gambling or not sleeping well, affecting mental health and other emotions and then that leading to gambling. I think I was also quite young so my mum and brother would have picked up on things that I wouldn’t of. So, they might have they probably would have a different answer, I think. They would have been able to recognise things better. I was often wanting in my own world. I think perhaps too egocentric. As a child I just thought about the world being my own world. I didn’t really have much capacity to except, to think about escaping the situation I was in.

And it was only as I got older that I started to empathize that there was more to it, and you know my dad wasn’t just a bad person. There was difficulty and struggles underlying it. I think perhaps one of the – one thing that might be causing things to get worse is that sort of financial pressure and stresses, perhaps. It was recognizing that the provisions in the household weren’t the same as, you know, his other family members or he wasn’t as well-off as his other family members, brothers and sisters and so perhaps talking to his brothers and sisters, or perhaps being reminded of things like that or the difficulties that he might have had, or just the difficulties at home that those might have been triggers. But I’m actually not too confident if I know that for a fact.

Kishan
Gambling Experiences

I think probably advertising seems to be one of the biggest things that affects consumption of anything and at the moment we’ve got a lot of advertising and a lot of it is online as well. So often there’s people talking about banning advertising in different places like TV and radio but for me it just doesn’t make sense. If we know that tobacco advertising had to be banned comprehensively, it had to be banned everywhere for it to be effective because we know the tobacco industry just moved money around and put it wherever it was not regulated and that’s what they’ve done with online. They’ve put it through affiliates, they put it through social media, wherever. I see so many gambling ads. I’m constantly bombarded with them.

I think when I look back two years ago, I did a little experiment on Facebook of how many ads I can see, how many gambling ads I could see in the span of five minutes and I’d got a dozen, like 12 gambling ads every five minutes, and that’s just me scrolling through and I scroll a lot, I’m a young person. I might not look it, or I might not act like it, but I am quite young, so I’m quite into scrolling on social media. And yeah, to be seeing 12 ads. I did have to ban them in the end and block them from Facebook because otherwise you just constantly get them. I still get a few, but I do block them now, but it’s just an insane amount and obviously, for someone to get 12 ads in five minutes it’s sort of a worrying imbalance of regulation and what needs to be.

Fair enough if we had one ad every hour or something like that relative to other things but that’s not the case and that’s not how it would be because obviously the industry needs to make a lot of money. They need to make money for their shareholders and the shareholders demand it, so the executives provide it. And there’s no real concern for gambling harm. That’s not really in their interest. So, you know, we can see that for other things like climate change and all sorts of other things, where it’s like just one incentive, which is profit.

Kishan

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
Stigma

I remember the day my dad passed away and the day before. So, my dad felt really ill. This is something I don’t really share often. I do have a tremendous amount of guilt for it, but I’m so I also didn’t mention that my dad had been suffering from health problems like diabetes and he was a big smoker. He smoked at least 20 cigarettes a day. And he wouldn’t take good care of himself, and so sort of my job to make sure that he had the right medicines for his work because he’d be working 12-hour shifts. He needed to have the right medicines for that long shift, and he would also need to be reminded to take medicines at home as well. So that sort of put me into the contest or I was a doctor at home. At home, my dad would call me his doctor as well. And that’s when he was being nice. And you know, things, things had been going well for him perhaps at the betting shops or perhaps if he was doing better himself mentally, then he wouldn’t be as abusive and it’d be quite nice actually, quite loving.

But as I was coming back to, going back to the day he passed away, the day before, the previous day I remembered my dad feeling really ill and he was in his bed during the day and that was very unusual. He would never be in bed, and I didn’t want to think about it. I think my dad asked me what should I do? Should I go to work, or should I? What should I do? And I remember just saying if you feel well enough then go to work. I’m sure you’ll feel better soon. Yeah, I think my feeling at that moment was to just think, look, he’s sort of asleep, he’s unwell. I can go do what I want. I’m not at risk of being abused or, you know, I’m safe. I’m happy. That was a good outcome for me. And then I remember being woken up the day after in the early hours and mum and brother being there crying and telling me that my dad had passed away on the way from work. I was in disbelief. I didn’t know what to think or feel. I remember them crying and then not having the feeling or the desire of, you know, of feeling like I wanted to cry. Then they told me I should cry, and I just didn’t know whether I should or what I should be feeling.

I think that has caused me a tremendous amount of guilt because you know, obviously I realized I didn’t have any part in it, but I do feel quite sad about the whole I miss my dad. But I also realize that I miss the good side and the positive side, instead of having a rose-tinted view towards it as well and realize that at the time and I try to be kind to myself and to realize at the time things were very difficult.

Kishan
Harm

I managed to get good grades in my first year of college and then in my second year of college something just triggered me really badly and I just lost all interest in everything. Which was essentially I was applying for medicine. My personal tutor at my college decided to put the predicted grades that was not compatible with one of my choices. So, I got a rejection from one of the universities that I really wanted to go to – UCLA at the time. You know, for medicine it can be really competitive so just losing one of the application spots, I just felt devastated. I thought that’s one of the two universities that I wanted to go to and not one of the backups so and I just, yeah, I really struggled. The personal tutor at the time just defended it by saying it wasn’t his fault. And I thought well whose fault, is it? Because I told you that you needed to put an A* in Biology or Chemistry and I did the right things and you made a mistake, but you won’t even admit it. And I had no one to talk to. So my mum doesn’t speak good English, and my brother had been at university at the time, so I was just sort of alone in that and I stopped going to college often and when it came to doing the exams, I didn’t turn up for some of them and that showed how little I cared even though I was quite studious and I had been getting good grades up until that point. I’d actually done four or five A-levels. I’m not sure how you call it nowadays, but I did an extra A-level essentially at college and because of all the stuff that had been weighing on me emotionally, I just stopped caring and all the effort I put in got wasted.

When it came to results day, I came to realize that I need to just do something otherwise I’ll be stuck at home, and I really needed to get out there. And the best sort of option for me was to get into medicine and hopefully get to London so I can sort of escape. I didn’t really want to go anywhere else. And I spent summer holidays trying to find a college that will take me on. I explained to them that my dad had died, and that was the cause of me sort of not doing well at A-levels. I just needed an extra year to sort my grades out and that my first year grades were great and the second year grades were not great because of the emotional stuff and that I just needed an extra year to do more A-levels and prove to them at the university that I would be applying for that I’m academically capable. It was just a bad year. And I did that. I did that, and yeah, I worked really hard. I, you know, I worked hard.

Kishan
Harm

As I started year 7, I started to get £5 a day. Sorry, I meant five pounds a week, £5 a day would be ludicrous. £5 a week and that meant all my sort of spending money if I wanted to buy food or anything extra at school or whatever or to save it. And yeah, as a kid, I was very cash conscious. I was very conscientious of the fact that we didn’t have a lot of money. And I used to save all of it. I didn’t spend any money on food or anything.

So, I used to accumulate a couple of hundred pounds across a year and I constantly had quite a large amount of money, more than £50. I would always have that like a large amount, not really knowing what I’d do with it and coming to reflect on it I’m not sure why, why I would bother having £50 at that age but essentially it would just get borrowed. It would just get taken off me and my dad would say can I borrow some money off of you and I would say, you know, are you just going to lose it though? And he would sort of say no, I’m not, I’ll give back to you, I promise, you know. I don’t really have a choice because if I do carry on resisting then he’s just going to get angry, he’s going to get abusive. And so, there’s really no way of me saying no.

And actually, that reminds me of the fact that there were times that my well, my mum would often try to hide money in the house and my dad would often ransack the house. It was almost like it was being burgled. He would go through all of my mum’s things to find money, and he would get it eventually. And if it if my mum had taken it to work, for example, if he couldn’t find it then he would go to her workplace in front of all her work colleagues and all the work colleagues were all of the same sort of ethnic cultural background because again it was sort of manual work in a factory, and a sweet factory. So, he’d go in front of them and say, you know, I need you to get the money, and my mum would tell me about that after. Yeah, and she would cry about it.

Kishan
Harm

I just I had this weird feeling, and I’ve asked other affected others if they’ve had a similar feeling, if it’s all real because it just doesn’t seem possible that a betting shop could allow someone to be addicted in the way of losing their life, their life that, you know, multiple hours every day, hundreds of pounds every day that the shop, the people that work in the shop could allow this to happen, that the companies themselves could be allowed to happen, that legally this could be allowed to happen. But, you know, somehow, it’s true and it kind of has been sort of a gaslighting sort of feature in my mental health I guess up until that point.

Then as I started to look into it, I realized this is a whole big issue that the industry has managed to sweep under the rug and I mean, we could talk all day about all the issues that there are. Yeah, I think that sort of gets me to where I am today. And as I’ve started to look into the issue, I managed to work with others. At first, I was anonymous, so I came out of the gambling crisis and that was my way of sort of promoting awareness about the issue. I didn’t realize that there were others trying to do the same. As I started to go on Twitter, I realized that there were many others doing the same. I met up with a few. I started to build a sort of community of people that I could trust and friends and then eventually I de- anonymised a couple of months later, I think about five- or six-months in. I changed my name and that’s as part of the podcast The All Bets Are Off podcast. So that came about and that’s when I started sharing my own experience in a similar way to, as I have done today. And several months later, we ended up setting up talk gen, and now we’re a charity called Gambling Education Network, and that sort of leads me today

Kishan
Recovery

I spent a tremendous amount of time in this space. I’m not really sure what the word is of the space but essentially, I’m a trustee for a charity that I’ve helped set up called the Gambling Education Network and it means so much to me. I think, you know, it’s something that gets me up and it’s this thing that also, you know, I think about before I go to bed. It’s sort of an all-day affair. And the reason it kind of is my personality right now in the past two years of working in this space, I’ve kind of distanced myself from friends and everything else, like any anything that I used to do before has sort of taken less of a priority. That’s included medical school. And the reason is, is because I think it’s a huge problem and really neglected. I just feel that it’s, you know, one of my callings. I think when I was 18, I felt like I wanted to go and help people. I wanted to make the world a better place and that’s why I went for medicine. I thought, you know, science and all of that was how I would do it. But then I’ve come to realize that I can, you know, I feel like my purpose and place is actually in this space and there’s so much to be done and I can have so much more of an impact.

And the way I sort of think about it is thinking about my, my younger self. I think about little Kishan or little Kish. I call myself little Kishan in my head and imagine how children like myself when I was a child were or are being affected by gambling harm through a family member’s gambling. It just really resonates to think that, you know, they’re completely innocent and it can be really horrible and for a long period of time, and even today, I experience gambling harm and it’s all legacy harm, and it’s very difficult. I sort of have a lot of empathy to children who are going to be the sort of next generation or are the next generation now and that’s sort of what drives me.

Kishan
Recovery

I think my first memories probably begin at age four or five… But essentially, I was born into a family that’s a working-class family. Both my parents are actually immigrants. They got married in the UK and it was an arranged marriage. I think the story of gambling harm starts around then. I’m not really sure exactly if my dad had been gambling before prison or after prison, but I do know that as soon as my mum had met him there were sort of difficulties right from the beginning.

Gambling Experiences

I remember in reception that I used to be often the last kid to be picked up, and that felt awful because you could see everybody else’s parents coming to pick up, you know? And you’re just there left…I never told anyone about gambling, not teachers, not anyone at the school, not friends. Nobody knew, except the people from our sort of cultural background… No one asked me if there was anything going on at home. I was always sort of focused… I didn’t want there to be any complaints to give a reason to my dad to go and hit me.

Gambling Experiences

My mum would often try to hide money in the house and my dad would often ransack the house. It was almost like it was being burgled. He would go through all of my mum’s things to find money, and he would get it eventually. And if it if my mum had taken it to work, for example, if he couldn’t find it then he would go to her workplace in front of all her work colleagues … So, he’d go in front of them and say, “I need you to get the money”, and my mum would tell me about that after. And she would cry about it.

Gambling Experiences

I remember my dad saying he wants to quit many times, and he did have periods where he would abstain from gambling and wouldn’t go to the betting shops. And there were periods also where he would define gambling as sort of sustainable, where he would gamble a certain amount, win a certain amount a day and then stop and I think he was convinced that that could work. And as a kid, I was convinced too.

Gambling Experiences

I would hide and pray to God and say I’ll do anything to get me out of this situation. And I think after a few times of trying that I realised that no one was listening… But I think that that’s why I sort of realised that there’s no one there and, there’s no religion and I’ve never sort of believed in it from that point, even though I was so desperate. I just didn’t see a way out.

Gambling Experiences

When I was about eight years old, I started to help my dad access gambling through the laptop or the computer. That would involve logging onto horse racing live streams and putting them on for him. I remember even setting up an online casino account and being there to help him deposit and withdraw money as a kid.

Gambling Experiences

My job to make sure that he had the right medicines for his work because he’d be working 12-hour shifts. He needed to have the right medicines for that long shift, and he would also need to be reminded to take medicines at home as well. At home, my dad would call me his doctor as well. And that’s when he was being nice.

Gambling Experiences

My brain had started to develop a lot more as I became a teenager, and I could sort of start to empathise with my dad and his struggles. I could see the things that he was going through, that he would work 12 hours a day, multiple days in a row… He must’ve been so tired… but after he’d wake up after going to sleep for four or five hours, he would go to the betting shop.

Gambling Experiences

I remember times that my dad would tell me to go away and say I was bad luck and that I’d jinxed things. I think sometimes he wouldn’t want me to be there too he didn’t want me to be exposed to it. I’m actually I’m not sure… I don’t think that was the reason really because he would smoke in front of me, do drugs in front of me, gamble in front of me. I don’t think any of that mattered because the addiction presided over everything.

Gambling Experiences

Often when he wasn’t at home, I felt safe. I felt happier that I was actually glad to see my dad leave to go to the betting shops often or for him to not be in eyesight because, just someone to scream at you, to hit you. It was awful, and I think it’s also the fear of that happening at all times. So I did my best to just sort of survive through childhood. And I remember thinking that I just want to get out of this, and there was a few times that I ran away from home. And I think my mum was very scared for me because she knew that I would eventually have to come and face my dad.

Gambling Experiences

It just doesn’t seem possible that a betting shop could allow someone to be addicted in the way of losing their life, their life that, you know, multiple hours every day, hundreds of pounds every day that the shop, the people that work in the shop could allow this to happen, that the companies themselves could be allowed to happen, that legally this could be allowed to happen.

I went home, searched for neglected health issues, and I found Tom Watson deputy leader of the Labour Party at the time talking about gambling being this huge crisis. And that was the first time anyone had ever talked, or I had ever heard gambling from anyone outside of my own family to realize that I wasn’t the only one to be affected and that my dad wasn’t the only one. At the time of my dad’s passing, I didn’t believe it.

Stigma

I think for a long, long period, I’ve been troubled with anxiety, and I think part of that is feeling very different and not feeling like I can connect with anyone… I guess the other side of it is the whole cultural ethnic experience I guess of being a different sort of culture, but as I’ve said to you about the sort of arranged marriage and patriarchal system and all the sort of norms that went with it.

Stigma

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.

Stigma

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.

Stigma

I remember being woken up the day after in the early hours and mum and brother being there crying and telling me that my dad had passed away on the way from work. I was in disbelief. I didn’t know what to think or feel. I remember them crying and then not having the feeling or the desire of feeling like I wanted to cry. Then they told me I should cry, and I just didn’t know whether I should or what I should be feeling. I think that has caused me a tremendous amount of guilt because obviously I realized I didn’t have any part in it, but I do feel quite sad about the whole I miss my dad… I try to be kind to myself and to realize at the time things were very difficult.

Stigma

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 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.

Stigma Harm

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
Stigma

I think at the age of seven, I was on this sort of religious slash cultural sort of retreat with them at a family friend’s house, but they were sort of organizing some religious teachings. So, my cultural background for my family and my parents is Hinduism. I’ve never been a believer in religion, even from a young age, and I think that’s partly down to my experiences… And so, we were on this sort of religious sort of excursion at a friend’s house. We were playing video games. I remember pulling out a knife. I remember going to the kitchen and getting one of the big knives out and saying I want to kill myself and in front of all these people that I knew as friends.

Harm

There were times where I would be contemplating it by myself or saying it to my brother or whatever. I think my childhood was full of these sorts of memories of not wanting to be alive and thinking about suicide, thinking about ways to do it. I was a child, so I don’t know if I actually meant it. I knew I was very upset. And I knew I didn’t want to live at the moment.

Harm

We didn’t have a boiler because we couldn’t afford it… So there was always a sort of financial pressure, and obviously there’s been all this weight of debt on my mum and on me as well. I think from a young age, there’s also this idea that me and my brother being able to understand English and yeah, we’ve sort of been managing the household in different ways from a young of age, something that my dad actually encouraged. But also, when he passed away, it sort of did just fall to us to do everything regarding bills and whatever.

Harm

Even throughout primary school and secondary school, I would come home and if I didn’t have the keys, I think I’d started to get the keys to the house when I was in year 8 or year 7. But up until that point I would just sit on the wall outside of the house and wait for my dad to come home and often I’d need the toilet after the end of school, and I would just be stuck there. I remember the neighbours saying do you want to come in? And I just felt too shy or anxious to say yes.

Harm

I describe my experience of gambling harm being quite like an onion, to my dad and to other family members, to myself. There’s multiple layers to it and to peel back. It’s not just one person, not just one experience. It’s different people including myself, and ongoing as well in different ways.

I started to get a lot of abdominal pain and then I’d come to realize that I’d got something called IBS, which is irritable bowel syndrome, and that’s never felt good to know that I’ve got something that typically affects 30, 40, 50-year-olds at the age of 15 and 16.

Harm

This legacy harm this is something that’s going to affect my quality of life for a long period of time, it’s going to affect my mum’s quality of life. She’s still worried about paying off debts. She’s still working too many hours, and she’s got health problems too from working. And no doubt I’ve mental health problems from the issues from childhood.

Harm

I was just at home two or three weeks ago for Christmas, and it was pretty awful, actually. I think I’ve always wanted to escape from home, so I even had a panic attack on the way home… I don’t really get panic attacks, but seemingly when I’m travelling back, I seem to do. And I think it is difficult to see family for loads of reasons. I think the ongoing harms, legacy harms. It’s constant worry between us of each other and each of us not doing well in different ways.

Harm

I think around this time I started to struggle with my own addictions as well. So, I mentioned alcohol as being part of it, but also drugs started to come into part of it as I turned 18. And as I got into university, some of that continued and that escalated. And so, my own addictions started to develop and just escalate and at the same time my IBS started to escalate and develop, and I just struggled.

Harm

My own addictions started to develop and just escalate and at the same time my IBS started to escalate and develop, and I just struggled. So, I basically just managed to scrape by through first, second and third year of three years, the first three years of medicine.

Harm

I remember reflecting on the taxonomy of harms not too long ago, and I remember there’s either criminal sort of crime parts of it so there’s like neglect and duress and all the stuff that we experienced where my dad would take us to outside the betting shop and he would go into the betting shop for several hours and I remember being there just sat in the car.

Harm

With other sorts of crimes, I think my dad had been engaging with shoplifting to drug sort of consumption. I’m not sure he ever dealt drugs, but I remember actually being outside in the car when he would go inside some houses. I’m sure some funny business was going on and I was just a kid and that happened quite regularly too.

Harm

I remember my dad saying he wants to quit many times, and he did have periods where he would abstain from gambling and wouldn’t go to the betting shops. And there were periods also where he would define gambling as sort of sustainable, where he would gamble a certain amount, win a certain amount a day and then stop and I think he was convinced that that could work.

Recovery

I never told anyone about gambling, not teachers, not anyone at the school, not friends… No one asked me if there was anything going on at home. I was always sort of focused… I didn’t want there to be any complaints to give a reason to my dad to go and hit me or cause abuse or anything like that. I made sure that I didn’t cause any trouble at school and if I did have any problems at school, I would beg them not to tell my dad.

Recovery

I have been to counselling once which was unrelated to gambling. Well, obviously it was related but gambling just never came up. Perhaps it wasn’t the best of experiences. It felt like obviously, if I didn’t mention gambling, then I think they kind of didn’t understand a lot of it because the big context in my whole life has been gambling.

Stigma Recovery

At first, I was anonymous. I came out of the gambling crisis and that was my way of promoting awareness about the issue. As I started to go on Twitter, I realized that there were many others doing the same. I met up with a few. I started to build a community of people that I could trust and friends and then eventually I de- anonymised a couple of months later.

Recovery

I just try to engage and motivate and sort of be a part of as many different projects as I can and support other projects. I think we’re all in this together and if you know there’s not millions of us, but thousands of us, maybe. The more we develop and the more we grow, the better for the thing that we’re campaigning for and essentially that would mean less gambling harm and prevention of gambling harm.

Recovery

My childhood wasn’t really a normal childhood. So, you know, pets, toys, birthdays, all sort of normal childhood things weren’t just really not in my sort of life. But I’m really happy to sort of be exploring some normal things in the past few years and so I’ve got an adorable dog called Bella. She means the world to me.

Recovery

The age should be increased to something like 25, when the brain is properly matured, and people can make the right decisions and not have student loans. Having £10,000 as I did as a London student from poor financial background, you get £10,000 you get given £10,000 that essentially people have gambled their student loan away, so it just doesn’t make sense for an 18 to 21 year old when they are very unlikely to have the sort of resources to be gambling, even if it’s £10 or £20 and we cannot really afford it, especially as a student if you don’t have an income.

Change

I think people just think 18 is like a magical age where everything should just become and perhaps it should be for things like voting, where it should be encouraged, like maybe it should even be 16 because you start something young, you’re more likely to do it. And if it’s a good thing like voting, maybe if people start voting at 16, they’re more likely to do it when they’re older as well. But if you apply that principle to gambling or smoking or alcohol, would you really want them to be doing it more when they’re older and to be developing addictions?

Change

Stigma that was a huge thing that I experienced as a child even and afterwards in adolescence and it took me even four or five months of knowing about this issue and that it affected so many other people before I decided to de-anonymise. I think part of my other motivation behind whenever I try to speak is that hopefully I’m helping someone else perhaps from a similar background so it can resonate with me. I know people come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and colours and creeds and backgrounds, and hopefully I might be able to help someone who’s got something similar to me, it might help them and help them share. It might help them enter a period of understanding, reflection, and recovery, essentially.

Change

When I turned 18, I made a bit of money from using the free bet offers with matched betting, and I don’t know how much I made, but there were a few times where I gambled around that, and I lost money. I didn’t really keep a good record of how it all went, but then I put it away. I remember whenever I smoked cigarettes in the early days, and even now, I guess through a less extent and same with gambling I remember my dad and how I don’t want to be like him and to reflect that this is sort of the worst thing for me to be the sort of little Kisher would have hated for you to be smoking, for you to be gambling and that sort of has helped me. I’ve never won money from gambling, which has probably helped me too, other than the matched betting. In second year as well, again, I’m not sure what happened but this was after I’d been matched betting, and like many months later. I don’t know why. I think I still had the account open, and I was watching cricket one day and something obviously must have triggered me. I wasn’t feeling too good about myself. Obviously, the IBS and mental health stuff I’ve been describing had still been going on and I ended up spending £300/400 putting bets on the same cricket match. And then because of its live nature sort of just encouraged me to and the odds constantly changing it sort of did facilitate for me to just keep escalating bets and sort of chasing my losses in a way, I guess. I lost all that money. My girlfriend saw me do that, and I guess that wasn’t too good. I realized that I don’t want to do that again. And I don’t think I have done since then. So, I’ve only had I think those two sort of significant periods where I’ve been gambling. One of them was actually just one episode, which is just one cricket match, but I’ve actually kept away from it quite a bit, but other family members haven’t.

Kishan
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