Well, [son] started gambling when he was 14, and it was online poker. As a parent, I advise my boys on the dangers of drugs, alcohol, predators, that type of thing, driving too fast when they pass the test. The one thing I never saw the danger in was giving him a laptop and a smartphone. Basically, what I did, I handed [son] a loaded weapon. I gave him the means to, basically, go down this path.

Did you know you can’t stop a business card being used for online gambling? While Barclays, Santander, etc, they all bang on about, “Look what we’re doing to stop personal gambling.” I’ve tried with Barclays to put it on Gamban. I’ve tried to– In a personal banking app, you can go into it, and actually not be able to gamble using your personal bank card, but you can’t do it with a business card… Also, he didn’t have to verify. He’d memorized the number and didn’t have to do any verification at all. He just inputs the information. There needs to be more due diligence.

If you listen to talkSPORT, it is sponsored by, I think, Bet365. Every 10 minutes, there’s a, “Oh, and the odds on the next goal being scored to 10 to 1.” Literally, in an hour program, you will have 10 gambling adverts. We need to stop bombarding people with this message that gambling is good, and gambling will lead to a six-bedroom mansion with a swimming pool in the back garden.

It’s like with the recent Bet365 advert that says, “Oh, be responsible. Put a timeout in and take your nan out for lunch. Take your child for ice cream.” As [son] says, “If you are a normal client, why would you need to put a timeout in place? What that advert is saying, “Hey, addicts, all of you guys that make us billions and billions of pounds, put a timeout in. Take granny for an ice cream down the beach. That’s a pat on the head. You’re doing a good job, now come back and gamble all your wages.”

I would love to see psychology banned from advertising. I know that seems really a weird thing, but we all know that psychology is used very much in advertisements, and how to get into people’s brains. We know that the gambling industry has some amazing neurobiologists, neurologists, psychologists all sitting behind the scenes that know exactly what to put into an advert.

Now, we know they’re doing loot boxes, aren’t they? They do these in-app purchases, and we’re already feeding their dopamine, and they’re 9 and 10-years-old. We have to stop that. Again, we need to keep talking about it, because the more people we talk to, and the more awareness we bring, maybe parents will start to listen, and start monitoring this kind of behaviour, because the online betting companies now, they’re not targeting you and me as adults, they’re targeting young people.

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.

I think it was a new Lion King movie years ago, and I think it was Bet365 used the Lion King as an advert. They used the launch of the new movie as a new online slot machine. I thought, how can that be allowed?… If you look at a lot of online gambling sites, they use pictures from, that look like Moana and things like that. These pretty princesses, they have no place in gambling at all.

[Son] would gamble on poker online, and then he moved onto slot machines, physical slot machines, which he always went to the biggest stake slot machine. Then, of course, slot machines moved online as well, so it wasn’t just online poker, it was the slot machines.

The lack of wellbeing checks from gambling companies. When someone at 24-years-old can bet £24,000 from a business account, not a personal account, and receives a phone call from the betting company to say, “Oh, we noticed a lot of activity. Are you okay Mr. [surname]?” [son] says, “Yes, I’m just dandy.” “Okay, you crack on.” Then, the bank rings as well, and says, “Oh, we’ve noticed that there’s a lot of activity this evening. Are you okay Mr. [surname]?” He says, “Yes, I am.” They go, “Okay, that’s fine. Crack on.” That to me is where the problem is.

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.

[Son] last week showed us here how he could, even though he is on Gamban, and he is self-excluded, he signed up to three online betting companies, and deposited money before he was asked to verify who he is… And even with one of them, with the verification, they asked for his driver’s license, which he emailed in, and they still allowed him to continue.

They say there are checks in place, and for some companies, they do their due diligence. They do the verification before you’re allowed to deposit money. Yet, three times on Friday, [son] opened three new accounts, deposited money, and did a spin on each one, then withdrew the money back into his account, and only one of them asked for his driver’s license, and still verified him. That’s not supposed to happen.

With gambling, I can drug test [son], I can get him to do an alcohol test. I can’t test him for gambling. I have to trust, when he looks me in the eye and says, “No, mum, I haven’t gambled,” or, “Yes, mum, I did a football bet.” That’s his truth because I can’t test him for it.

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.

We’re the ones that are left sitting at home with that guilt of, “What about if I had spoken to somebody, could I have stopped it?” No, actually, you probably couldn’t, but there is so much fear and guilt. I think with parents, don’t feel guilty, it’s your child. You always look and think, “What did I do wrong to make my child an addict?” I have done that to myself. “What did I do wrong? Did I not love him enough? Did I not give him enough attention? Did I always give him too much financial and monetary, and materialistic things? Is it my fault that he’s an addict?”

If you remove everything from an addict, they will find a way to get what they need. He would either be in prison now, or dead now. As a parent, the payoff for us financially was huge, but as a mum, the payoff financially is nothing. I find that quite important to get that message out there, because I find that other people can be quite judgmental when they don’t understand addiction. They think it’s a simple case of, “Well, just take it away.” It’s not that simple. Taking the addiction away has a repercussion, which is dangerous. It’s so multifaceted.

Emotionally, anybody that loves an addict on any level, as parents our fear is the loss of your child… You never lose that fight-or-flight feeling when you love an addict. It may be slightly different as a parent of an addict, because you’ve got that maternal instinct and paternal instinct. Emotionally and psychologically, the scars of loving an addict are huge. They leave you in a constant state of anxiety, like I said, fight-or-flight. You don’t want to go away for weekends.

Some days it’s like a current, it will just sit there and it’s there. Other days, it’s like a tsunami, and it can come in and it will wipe the family out. You live with that in your gut every day…You constantly live with– I would say it’s fear, and sometimes that’s at 10, and sometimes it’s at 1, but that fear never goes away when you have an addict with you. You’re just constantly watching for cues, watching for little changes in body language, reading into statements…You do live in fight-or-flight, I feel 24/7. That’s how I feel that I’m constantly on the edge with him. Whether that’s hanging off the edge by your fingertips, or just peering over the edge, it changes from day-to-day.

What I was doing was, basically, I was enabling him because I was helping him out of his financial situation that he was getting into from the gambling. I was helping him out by subbing in, digging him out of a hole. I was enabling him… People would say to me, “You need to cut him off financially. Don’t let him have access to the account.” That’s all very good and well, but when the option of that is just then put a noose around his neck, you can’t withdraw the financial support because he would have killed himself. He never said it. It was a never a guilt thing of him saying, “If you don’t give me the money, mum, I’ll kill myself.” It was more him being very honest in saying, “I can’t ever see this stopping, mum, unless I’m no longer here. I don’t know how to stop this.”

It then has the impact with my younger son. He’s absolutely amazing, but the attention is always on the addict. [Younger son] almost got lost in [son]’s addiction as well, by way of parental support and us being present with [younger son], because [son]’s addiction is so demanding.

You don’t want to be more than an hour away from your child. You don’t want to go on holiday, because the fear, addiction gives you this overwhelming fear like nothing else, because you can lose someone. They can step out off a curb and get hit by a bus, and that is horrific and awful. Addiction, it’s here all the time, and it’s moving around us all the time, and we’re never quite sure when it’s going to grab him.

I was enabling him, and we ran a business then, exactly the same as we are now, and he had access to our business account, and he literally drained it. In one weekend when he was 24, he gambled £24,000 in one weekend. We lost everything.

They’re always going to be tumultuous because it’s never going to be a mill pond when you’ve got an addict. Today’s a really good day. That’s how we all live our lives a day at a time with [son].

By me naming [son]’s addict, we’ve actually opened a line of communication, where we can differentiate between [son] and Keith, which for some people, probably, sounds bonkers, but actually, it really helps our family. It gives you an honesty, and it gives you an openness.

I haven’t sought any kind of therapy or peer support, because I actually don’t feel I need it. I think I’m probably in the minority, because I’m fortunate that I’ve lived with the addiction for so long. I’m secure and knowledgeable enough in myself to not have to go to peer support at the minute… Maybe I get my peer support from being able to help with these research projects. Maybe that’s my peer support in a way.

We got him to a therapist, who one of her things was she specialized in addiction. Again, absolute waste of time and money, because what she did, she got [son] to do a spreadsheet, so, “What I want you to do, [son], after this session for a week, I want you to keep a spreadsheet, and on that spreadsheet, track your money gambled. What comes in, what you gamble out, your wins, your losses and then bring me that spreadsheet back.” What [son] did, he just did a spreadsheet full of utter nonsense, gave it back to her, and she said, “Oh, well-done. You haven’t bet much this week, have you?”

I do find now what we’ve been through is helping us, or helping me because like I said, doing the work with GamLEARN and GamCare, and Betknowmore etc and being able to be part of research programmes, where I can bring my voice, my experiences… I suppose I’m fortunate that, I have an academic mind, so I love research, and I’ve always been a great believer in, arm yourself with as much knowledge as you can deal with and understand.

He didn’t have to verify. He’d memorized the number and didn’t have to do any verification at all. He just inputs the information. There needs to be more due diligence.

We need to stop bombarding people with this message that gambling is good, and gambling will lead to a six-bedroom mansion with a swimming pool in the back garden. The odds are one in a million of that happening. The odds of somebody committing suicide through their gambling is, I think going to be huge in years to come.

If you remove everything from an addict, they will find a way to get what they need. He would either be in prison now, or dead now. As a parent, the payoff for us financially was huge, but as a mum, the payoff financially is nothing… I find that other people can be quite judgmental when they don’t understand addiction. They think it’s a simple case of, “Well, just take it away.” It’s not that simple. Taking the addiction away has a repercussion, which is dangerous.