241: Gambling related suicides

So maybe, Dan, can we start with you for an assessment of the scale of this problem? What, for example, do people bet on?

Well, there are a very large range of things that people bet on, and I think it's ever-growing because smartphones and gambling platforms are becoming more and more accessible and allowing people to bet on high-speed events within sports, within football matches, betting on sort of micro events in play that generate results and responses, outcomes of bets very, very quickly in a way that's recognized to be more addictive and emulating perhaps casino products like online slots games, which are recognized as being among the most addictive products, partly due to their speed.

So I think the key changes that have perhaps occurred over the last sort of couple of decades in gambling arise from sort of technological advances and the increased availability of casinos in people's pockets and these sort of increasingly high-speed games that are becoming more and more omnipresent and easily accessible to so many people.

And I think I read somewhere, was it in the Public Health England's recent Gambling Harms Evidence Review, they estimated that there is more than one suicide related to gambling every day in England alone.

Does that ring true?

Well, there are a number of different estimates that have been put forward publicly for numbers of suicides per year.

They are somewhat contentious, but I think it is right to say that the best estimates that are available indicate that the sort of number of suicides per year in England alone are in the hundreds.

And certainly, I think it's reflected in the work that we do and, and what we've seen through our work that this is a large-scale problem, that this is not just a case of, you know, an isolated few instances of people sadly taking their own life due to gambling addiction.

This is a significant, um, wide-scale public health issue.