Help Me!!
Self-directed Help
One of the biggest barriers which people wishing to seek help on gambling related harms - whether for themselves or for someone close to them - is that the harms caused by disordered and addictive gambling do not register highly on the public consciousness and therefore most people first discovering a need for knowledge find themselves starting from a position of almost total ignorance.
This raises an important question...
Where does someone go to find out more about Gambling Disorder and associated harms?
Well, hopefully here at GamHarm we will be able to provide at least some of the answers you are looking for - if not directly on our own platform, then by being able to signpost you to resources elsewhere which can help.
The first thing we would suggest is checking out the web resources of other organisations in the Gambling Harms support and information sector. Try looking up those listed on our Support & Advice page.
We live in an information-rich society, but that information tends to primarily come from on-line resources and there are two main problems associated with finding the information you need online.
These are knowing what to look for, and when to know that you have found it.
Search for anything on-line and you will probably find something on that subject, but what you find will only be as valuable as the effort which was put in to posting it on-line. For most popular subjects, i.e. those commonly looked for, there will usually be so many pages of results from any given internet search that picking out the wheat from the chaff is a daunting task. Gambling Addiction, Disorder, and Harm is slightly different. It is not a subject area which has attracted much input, or even output, and what is out there can be quite hard to convert into something relevant and of value to the purpose of your enquiry.
There are lots of (competing) statistics about gambling, and about harms caused by gambling, but the adversarial and bipartisan nature of reporting tends to obfuscate the core understanding. Industry will always promote research suggesting lower levels of risk and harm caused, while lived experience and support based organisations will try to flag up those suggesting higher prevalence and greater extent of harm.
As an admittedly Lived Experience based platform, we here at GamHarm would tend towards the latter, as basically, we have lived through and with harm caused by disordered gambling and we know just how under represented and under reported it is as a cause of ongoing detriment to society. But entering a shouting match with a £1.5bn funded marketing juggernaut about who is closer to the truth doesn't actually help those who find themselves needing to understand gambling harms to gain the knowledge they seek.
Which is why this section was created, to try and give guidance to those who wish to learn more in order to make better informed decisions about what help they need, what help is available, and how the experiences of those who have wrestled with the same quandaries can be leveraged to make the path of recovering from gambling harm easier to achieve.
This section is designed for people who want to be able to:
Help Themselves understand and overcome gambling addiction and harms caused by it.
Help Others overcome gambling addiction.
Gain greater understanding of Gambling Related Harms to inform other services or support roles.
Clicking on the links above should take you to the relevant sections [under development] but before you do jump off it must be pointed out that GamHarm does not see itself as providing professional or medically qualified advice. Everything you read on the GamHarm website is based entirely on accumulated Lived Experience - it is what others have found out "the hard way" and want to share in ways which will hopefully lessen the need for those following to have to experience the extremes of harm which those contributing may have previously encountered and endured.