Source: Sault This Week, Ontario, Canada; June 25, 2008.
Sault resident “Jane”, not her real name, had learned to recognize the peaks and valleys of her gambling addiction over the years.
Or so she believed.
Until the night she pulled out of her driveway with the intention of taking her own life. She realized then that she’d sunk to a dangerous and terrifying bottom.
“I headed out to commit suicide. I hit the corner of Second Line and North Street, and I said, ‘Oh God, please, I don’t want to die. I just don’t want to feel like this anymore.'”
Those feelings included both shame and guilt. After long stretches at a casino, as long as 30 hours, Jane said she was left feeling “totally drained, mentally and physically. The shame is absolutely brutal.”
Was casino staff aware? “Supposedly, they are monitoring upstairs. But it’s like ‘don’t kick that gift horse,’” she said. “And yet there are employees in the casino I have turned to who have been so compassionate that they would be prepared to do whatever they could for you. It was just written across my face, the devastation.”
Admitting that her gambling problem has deprived her of the financial security she should have had by this stage in her life, she said it was not the worst thing. “The worst thing isn’t losing money. It’s hurting other people.”
Those people include her son and daughter, her mom, and her sisters. Although Jane lost a relationship because of her compulsive gambling, she considers herself “very fortunate” her family has stood by her.
While Jane has managed to hold on to her home through re-mortgaging, she now lives with her mother and a sister at her mother’s home. “I’m below poverty level, but I didn’t have to be,” she said. “I made some bad choices and I’m paying my dues. A lot of it I don’t like, but the majority of it, I’m okay with now.”
One of Jane’s biggest regrets is that she was unable to assist her daughter financially, now in her fourth year of college education, because of her gambling addiction.
Sitting at the kitchen table with her mom by her side, Jane said she has been in “recovery” for a year and a half now. In lay terms, she has not gambled for that amount of time. It was her mom, in fact, who was her first “gambling buddy” in 1993 when she started gambling across the river at an American casino.
Her mom, who still gambles at the casino occasionally, said, “I started her going.” She said she didn’t realize right away that Jane and her oldest daughter were often gambling through the night. “I didn’t know until she’d gone into her first slump.”
As well as her family’s support, Jane attributes her recent success most to her involvement locally in the Gamblers Anonymous group who meet weekly. But most important, the members support each other day and night.
“Anybody on a dime would be there for you. I could call someone at two in the morning and they’ll be here,” Jane said. “I’ve had to do it for other people too. I’ve had to go to their doorsteps; I’ve had to stay on the phone.”
She added that attending treatment programs at the Addiction Treatment Clinic on East Street and in Guelph, Ontario on different occasions since 1995 did not prevent her from gambling, but helped in other ways.
“It did work to a great degree because even after I went back to the gambling, I knew I had a problem, and I also knew that what I was doing was wrong. I knew I had to get back to GA, keep going to meetings and not gamble,” Jane said.
Treatment cannot offer a cure for addiction as there is no cure, she said.
“Going through treatment, and suffering with major depression, I’ve learned a lot about myself,” Jane said. “Probably the best thing I learned was taking ownership. Everybody has their garbage; everybody has their luggage, and there is a time and a place when we all have to empty it. There is no value in blame, but learning about addiction, about behaviour, and about depression is important.”
One approach that did not work for Jane, however, was voluntary self-exclusion from casinos in Michigan and in Sault Canada. “I signed the self-exclusion program but it didn’t work for me,” she said.
Within a week of banning herself, she said that she’d returned to the Sault Ontario casino and also had gained entry to the Windsor casino, both operated by the Ontario Lottery and Gaming which initiated its self-exclusion program in all its gaming venues in December of 1999.
“That didn’t work for me. There’s an arrogance,” she said. “The way I looked at it was, it was just one more joke; it was only a piece of paper and no one really cared.”
But she refused to place the blame for that failure on either the Sault Michigan casinos or OLG. “I don’t think I’d ever say that banning couldn’t work. I’ve always respected the concept of banning, but the onus of the responsibility is on me,” Jane said.
While acknowledging that the current self-exclusion program required improvement, she said that whatever system was in place, gambling addicts would try to exploit it.
“I would try to find a way,” Jane said. “I am an addict. I am a liar; I am a cheat; I am a thief. I am all of these things when I am in addiction.”
According to the 2006/2007 Canadian Gambling Digest published annually by the Canadian Partnership for Responsible Gambling, recent provincial and national surveys “suggest that approximately 76 per cent to 82 per cent of adult Canadians participated in some form of gambling in the past year.
Based on similar surveys, between two per cent and 3.4 per cent of those gamblers in Ontario are at moderate risk or problem gamblers.
But Jane questioned the reliability of those statistics and suggested the actual numbers of problem gamblers are much higher than reported.
“In Ontario, most definitely it’s higher,” she said. “Compulsive gamblers don’t tell the truth. For years I never told the truth about it.”
Second, gambling is frequently a hidden addiction and one that offers numerous options. Besides casinos, there are lottery outlets, race tracks, charity bingos and raffles, Internet gambling, even playing the stock market, she suggested.
And unlike alcohol, drug or nicotine addictions, gambling is tolerated, even encouraged by society and the government, who depend on its revenue. “Our society promotes gambling; it just seems like every thing today is a gamble, and it is minimized so easily,” Jane said. “But it is such a contradiction because an addiction is an addiction is an addiction.”
Jane said there are between 15 to 20 people involved currently in the 12-step Gamblers Anonymous program in the Sault. Since she’s been involved, she estimated that around 70 persons had participated from both Sault Michigan and Sault Ontario.
She added that, in her opinion, the number of problem gamblers was much higher locally than those numbers suggest. “It’s been the demise of a lot of people. I’ve come across people who have committed suicide or gone to prison,” she said. “People here in town, the same thing. The devastation is huge. What is mind boggling for me is how few people are in the GA program.”
As for Jane, she continues to make progress with her recovery thanks to the support of her family and the GA. “The cure, in my life, is GA,” she said. I will always get the occasional trigger, but I also understand I have to make a choice.”