This section highlights the breadth of experiences of gambling harm across multiple domains of people’s lives.
Harm is pervasive and burdens lives long after gambling has stopped. Harms are complex and overlapping. Harm in one area of life contributes to harm in another part of life, so taken together, harm adds up to more than each area looked at alone.
People describe their experience of financial harms, relationship-related harms, mental and physical health harms, impacts on work, connection to a community, and criminal acts.
You can navigate through peoples’ experiences by using the toolbar or by clicking on the links above.
I thought I was okay when I was gambling, because it was distortion. Really, I was not okay at all. I was just going further and further down a hole. Coming out of gambling, my mental health has suffered in so many ways through loss and what gambling was taken away from me, and that is time with my family, rejection, shame, guilt.
I remember when I told my daughters and my oldest daughter just said “Dad, thank God there’s a reason for the way you’ve been like you are because we thought that you just didn’t like us anymore”. So that’s hard to take, knowing that nobody really mattered because all that mattered was gambling.
Was I actually present at work? I was doing my job. Was I giving it my all? I was literally sitting there betting. It’s all I thought about day and night, continuously. Everything else just seemed to be an absolute barrier.