This month we want to give you a peek inside how we come to offer some of the courses and workshops that we host at the Wellbeing and Recovery College with a focus on our work with the gambling support charity Aquarius, who not only help people to recover from problem gambling, but to help prevent it from becoming a problem.
The impact of problem gambling on mental health is staggering, (so much so that Samaritans have a policy position on it). Despite this, it is not always given enough attention, so working with Aquarius, https://aquarius.org.uk/our-services/adult-services/gambling/ a charity which support people 16 years and over affected by gambling, (either their own or other people’s), we have put on 2 face to face workshops, (one in each county), to raise awareness of different forms of gambling, its impact on people and how to tackle it.
I should add that we first met one of the Experts by Experience from Aquarius at the Time to Talk Day World Café event that focused on stigma and when we ran the sessions they included him sharing his story, his experiences and his Recovery journey as well as the single gambling question that we need to ask to get people to start talking and thinking about gambling. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive for these moving, fantastically interesting and informative sessions. One of the key points to come out of these workshops is “How do we protect our young people from being led into gambling habits through online gaming and how aware are we of what is going on?”
Thinking about this further we looked into the ‘The Patterns of Play’ report –the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) and Professor David Forrest and Professor Ian McHale (University of Liverpool)1, which highlighted that
“Whilst political debate and campaigns have focussed on the risks around betting, our research shows it is important to raise awareness of the gambling harms associated with online gaming. Gaming, in particular slots games, is much larger in terms of total online spending by British players and analysis of customer account data throws up more red flags indicative of potential harm from gambling.”
This led us to continue our work with to Aquarius to set up a workshop which shines a light onto this often hidden and potentially addictive aspect of online life. How much do you know about this? Is it enough?
Our next session of “What is Gambling Harm?” coming in September or email us for more information using the link in the footer below