Why BBC Three’s gambling addiction documentary is a must-watch
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BBC Three’s powerful new documentary Gambling: A Game Of Life And Death delves into the serious reality of gambling addiction in the UK. Trigger warning: this article contains reference to suicide.
Last year the gambling industry spent 1.5 billion on advertising. Over the last seven years, online gambling has almost tripled and 86% of the revenue comes from just 5% of the customers. Up to 1.4 million people in the UK are addicted to gambling.
Those are just a few of the sobering statistics laid bare in Gambling: A Game Of Life And Death, a powerful new BBC Three documentary looking at the devastating personal consequences of gambling addiction for two young men who were driven to the brink.
Although gambling is still commonly associated with betting shops on the high street, these days, you don’t have to step foot outside your front door to play the casino. As the internet has enabled a dramatic rise in online gambling, the leisure pursuit has become embedded into modern culture, giving an image of carefree fun and accessibility.
But gambling, as the new documentary so powerfully explains, is also a potentially dangerous activity, especially for young men under the age of 25 who are more than three times more likely to become addicted.
The word addiction is not hyperbole. As a consultant psychologist explains in the documentary, gambling can be as addictive as cocaine. That means that it’s also incredibly hard to stop gambling, and the stigma surrounding gambling addiction also keeps victims suffering in silence. When people can’t access the mental health support they need to recover from addiction, it has the capacity to destroy lives.
In the documentary, we hear the stories of how the addiction took over the lives of two young men, Jack from Sheffield and Harri from north Wales. Both started gambling as teenagers, and both became completely consumed by it despite their best efforts to stop.
While Harri is now in recovery from his gambling addiction, the documentary tragically details how Jack took his own life after feeling like he would never be able to break free from its hold.
“He felt that he would always be controlled by this, and he was not be able to live his life as he would want, and he despised himself, really, for not being able to be free of it, because he was told that it was all his fault, not by us, but by the culture,” says Jack’s mother in the film.
In the wake of Jack’s death, his parents discovered a wealth of research into the suicide risk associated with gambling. Despite this, they point out, very little is communicated in public health campaigns about the harms of gambling, with far too much emphasis on individual responsibility.
But it’s a reality that now needs to be shouted from the rooftops. In England, at least one person dies every day from gambling-related suicide. That bleak statistic, and the loss of their son, is what motivated Jack’s parents to start Gambling With Lives, a charity which works to make gambling safer and protect the public from the harm that gambling inflicts.
Four years after Jack’s death, an inquest into gambling regulations found that the state had failed to protect Jack’s right to life, and that the government failings in informing the public of the risks of gambling been “woeful”.
“Jack’s inquest revealed that the link between gambling and suicide has been known for years, but thousands of deaths later real change is yet to happen,” his mother read in a statement outside court.
With the release of this documentary, there is hope that a greater number of people suffering with a gambling addiction will now feel able to come forward and access the help and support they need.
Anyone concerned about their gambling, or that of a loved one, can visit BeGambleAware.org for free, confidential advice and support, or The National Gambling Helpline is available on 0808 8020 133 and operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Images: BBC/Blakeway North Productions
