Gambling is an activity where you place a bet on something. This could be on a sporting event, lottery, or a game of chance.

It can be a way to relieve unpleasant feelings or unwind, but it’s not healthy. Over time, gambling may cause problems, such as losing money or relationships.

If you are experiencing problems with gambling, there are a few things that you can do to help yourself. For example, you can ask for support from a friend or family member. You can also take up a new hobby that doesn’t involve gambling.

There are also support groups, like Gamblers Anonymous, that can help you stop gambling. You can find these online and in many local communities.

Harm from Gambling

There is a lot of uncertainty around what harm means in gambling related research. This is largely due to a lack of consistent definition and conceptualisation of harm across treatment providers, policy makers and researchers.

Despite this, there is a broad recognition that gambling has negative impacts on people’s lives and is associated with greater harms when a person gambles frequently or uses more money.

The data gathered for this project revealed a wide range of experiences of harm across a variety of domains of people’s lives. It highlighted the subjectivity of what people considered harmful to themselves or others and the complexity of inter-relationships between harms and sources of harm.

Three categories of harm were identified: general harms, specific harms and legacy harms. The general harms group reflected the first level of severity, where those gambling losses had affected the person who gambled and affected others in their life.