Update and Twelve Month Plan

Hello! Ages since we posted on The Machine Zone. We have been very busy with two projects under our banner. One is gamblingwatchscotland.org.uk which is a developing site looking at gambling in Scotland and beyond.

The other is our film, ‘One Last Spin’ which should be finished in November and premiered in December. The interviews dor the film were completed a long time ago but lockdown brought further work to a halt. We’re back shooting again, this time drama sequences to complement the interviews. Check onelastspin.vision for latest and some screenshots.

The Machine Zone has been running for five years come next February. It’s been very much a labour of passion and determination, and involved thousands of hours of voluntary work. Martin and Adrian have had to put in a lot of money to keep it going. This year we have a new director, Chris Lee who’s based in Edinburgh and runs a peer support service at chatter.org.

We received a £3,000 award from Greater Glasgow and Clyde NHS to deliver anti-stigma work, The money has helped build the website and some of it towards the film (which is set to cost in the many thousands for production), and rolling future costs for screening the film at community events initially in Glasgow through 2022.

The next year will continue to be occupied by these projects. However, where time allows we are keen to get going on exploring the digital environment generally, beginning with that slippery term ‘digital health’. In some quarters everything digital, new and shiny sends people weak at the knees with adoration. We’re not so sure. Our work on gambling harms, for instance, shows how quickly digital technologies have been taken up to cause tremendous harms to many.

We’ll look at what may be meant by ‘digital health’ (which is a very confused, and confusing, area) and try to place it in a broader context of the digital environment as a whole. Every new technology causes tremendous social upheaval, the good and the bad. It’s easier to see this looking back to the advent of machinery at the start of the Industrial Revolution, motor transport, mass media, and so on. Not so easy to see how each of us is affected by the digital revolution. Certainly we can identify obvious things such as new jobs and the internet. But there does seem a very strong case for considering whether our deep psyches are affected, our relationships, our well being.

Gambling Watch Scotland

The Gambling Watch Scotland website is now partially ‘live’. Full of life but still a baby. You can see a landing page which outlines the project and its content, and there’s a Support page. Both of these pages are temporary.

As we work on the website it’s sometimes overwhelming to discover how many aspects to talk about gambling damage there are. We are looking on the one hand at wordy reports and regulations from ‘them up there’ while keeping a central focus on individuals and their communities. We’re maintaining links with big organisations working on the human costs of gambling, while energised by the growing grassroots initiatives and the voices of Experts by Experience. It’s the grassroots work we’ll be highlighting and celebrating.

It’s a very small project in the scale of things. Though we look closely at the broad national contexts, we zoom in on Scotland, and particulaly Greater Glasgow because it’s in this city we will concentrate our attention to involve community citizen involvement.

We hope you can spare a few minutes to look over the landing page. We’d be delighted if you follow us on twitter or by email. Any ideas, articles videos you may wish to share, well. we’d be gobsmacked.

For those who don’t know what ‘gobsmacked’ means!

Gambling Watch Scotland

Formerly GamblEye!

Just to confuse everybody we have renamed our anti-stigma project to Gambling Watch Scotland

For various reasons we are going with the new name and logo. Everything about the project remains the same, and you can read a description here.

We shall be delivering our website in March. However, while we hope this will be a valuable and lasting resource which can be updated and invite contributions, our intention remains to deliver our work in community settings as and when COVID restrictions allow.

We’d love to hear from people for whom stigma brought shame and a reluctance to come forward to share their problems or seek support. We’d especially lke to hear from people suffering various degrees of social stigma already, before the stigma of gambling was added. These may include women, people from minority ethnicities, religious affiliates, refugees, people with high status jobs or positions in societies.

“As an addict, society tells you that you’re bad, somehow evil, a wrong ’un and you end up believing it.”
Victoria, former victim of heroin harms

We welcome any level of contribution from a few words to an article. If you feel willing to share your experiences of how stigma impacted, or is impacting, upon your wellbeing and recovery from harms please drop us a line at:

themachinezone@planetmail.net or DM us at twiiter, @themachinezone.

We’ll stick exactly to your wishes for how your contributions may be used.

Stigma: Tell Your Story

Stigma, shame, guilt can be a heavy load to bear leading to a horrible sense of isolation with nowhere to turn.

We’re working on a project, to be delivered online by March 2021, which aims to reduce the stigma around gambling by awareness-raising, provide ideas for individuals to cope with stigma, and share lived experience of gambling stigma. How bad was it? Did it stop you – or does it stop you – from reaching for support? Did you find ways to handle internalised stigma and the deep sense of shame or guilt that went with it? Was stigma particularly worse for you because, for instance, you are a woman or member of a community which has strong condemnation of addiction?

We’d love to hear from you. A short piece of writing maybe, using a pen name if you like. Or a long piece. Would you be prepared to take part in a Zoom session to discuss various aspects of gambling stigma? In all cases we will respect requests for strict anonymity.

Sharing your story will help others immediately to see that they are not at all alone in their feelings of isolation and any shame or guilt, that these are further intense bad feelings that come with addiction. Any ways you found to cope with stigma will also help people greatly.

If you can take part please send us your thoughts. As said, short or long – and sometime one or two sentences can be powerful. Please indicate whether you’d be prepared to consider taking part in a Zoom event.

We’re also very keen to hear from organisations working in the gambling field which have experience of how damaging stigma is to people they work with.

Please respond by email to

themachinezone@planetmail.net

or DM us on our twitter handle, @themachinezone.

Get in touch too if you have any questions.

GAMBLING WATCH SCOTLAND: an anti-stigma project

Stigma adds massively to the suffering of folk who have mental health issues. It may prevent their seeking support, leave them feeling isolated and ashamed that they have a ‘weakness’. There are even greater stigmas around addictions, and gambling disorders are known as the ‘invisible addiction’ – not only because you can’t see a substance involved, but also because there is very little understanding and awareness in the population. This includes health and other care professionals and policy makers. The consequence is that there is a lack of support services.

Across the mental health field there have been vibrant, powerful and dynamic anti-stigma campaigns and initiatives which have helped reduce stigma although there is still a long way to go.

The Machine Zone is developing a project to address stigma and gambling disorders. As with most anti-stigma initiatives we aim primarily to raise awareness and knowledge, and dispel myths. We shall also focus upon stigma itself – what it is, its damaging effects, and how we can cope with it.Initially, the idea was to take this into community settings, including prisons, with the aim of raising awareness, discussing issues, signposting support and encouraging citizen involvement. With Covid restrictions, we will now be presenting the project online, hoping in the future to work in communities. The project will be delivered in March 2021.

The project will include a film about lived experience and there will be sections about support, community work, stigma, articles for professionals and media, links and networks, partnership working, and a forum for discussion. We’ll refer to the many sections of the population bearing multiple stigmas and difficulties such as poverty, exclusion, social discrimination, poor health, inequality. We believe that one of the best ways to challenge stigma is to raise awareness and hear the voices of those affected.

This work contributes to NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde’s Healthy Minds anti-stigma initiatives, and several Third Sector mental health and addiction anti-stigma projects.

We’d love to include as many voices as possible. Please go here to read an invitation to contribute your own story.

The Trouble with Gambling Statistics

The Chief Executive of the Betting and Gaming Council, Michael Dugher, wrote in PoliticsHome on 9th January 2021:

When the Government announced before Christmas that it was kicking off the Review of Gambling, they did so with a “call for evidence” and they rightly said their determination to drive big changes will be “evidence-led”. This is something I strongly support.

Ministers made it clear that the percentage of problem gamblers in Britain stands at approximately 0.5 per cent of the adult population – comparatively low by many international standards – and that “this rate has remained broadly steady around or below one per cent for the past 20 years”.

The headline of his article calls for facts not fiction. He cites as facts that there is an ‘anti-gambling lobby’ who are ‘prohibitionists’ intent upon promoting ‘hysteria’ around gambling.

Facts are tricky things. So are statistics, data, ‘evidence’. Regarding the latter we published an article which raised some big questions about evidence during the campaigns to have the stake on Fixed Odds Betting Terminals reduced from £100 to £2. What was then the industry body, the Association of British Bookmakers, demanded ‘evidence that the machines were harmful with £100 stakes.

Evidence is not an innocent word. You can find or not find evidence for anything depending upon your perspectives and agenda. The big government and other machines for gathering evidence use models of gathering data. Interestingly, perhaps an admission of a failure of previous figures and ‘facts’:

This was in response to a recent House of Lords committee report on the gambling industry. Further, :

It would seem that neither the government nor the Gambling Commission have faith in the widely promoted ‘fact’ that ‘problem gamblers’ represent ‘only’ 0.7% of the population. A 2020 YouGov survey suggested that the figure is 2.7%. Quite a difference. When is a fact not a fact?

Aside, for a moment. The prevalence of the serious mental health condition called bipolar is estimated to be 2%. Should we say ONLY 2%? Not worth bothering about. Another fact to bear in mind in this aside is that with mental health diagnoses, three pyschiatrists may give three different diagnoses. And the diagnosing of mental health conditions varies between nations and different cultures. Further, it is clear that different sections of populations are more likely to receive particular diagnoses.

Returning to gambling harms:

So, even with current official figures, young people seem to represent a higher prevalence of harms than the general population. The young people of today are the adults of tomorrow and perhaps youth behaviour suggests worrying future trends in the near future.

While there are worrying indicators of increased exposure to gambling harms for women, the majority of people who face harm are men. Whole population figures do not remotely reflect the scale of the harms because they take an average which includes a gendered majority who face no harms.

Individual populations such as young people (which really needs breaking down to gender, ethnicity, social class, mental health conditions, educational attainment, religion, indices of poverty and deprivation) provide unuseful statistics as they don’t focus upon groupings within the individual population.

There are particular populations which require specific attention to them such as ethnic minorities, religious affiliates, LGBQT citizens. ‘Official’ attention to essential factors such as health, mental health especially, exclusion, exploitation, poverty, inequality and discrimination tends to be weakened by an institutionalised ‘whole population’ approach, the whole population being some vague collections of ‘normalised’ people. Of course, and it can’t be emphasised too much, that within ‘official’ institutions much progress is being made to remove this attentional blindness. What is most exciting is the ‘bottom up’ work of campaigning by minority groups, so often against the odds.

That report by the way shows that 4% of those surveyed were in prison because of gambling. Certainly, we have to move well beyond rather empty claims that the prevalence of gambling ‘disordered’ individuals in ‘the population’ is 0.5% (a figure which in any case is almost certainly a significant underestimate even using the outdated models previously used by the Gambling Commission and others). There are man, many populations within ‘the population’, and many individuals in each.

Stigma and the Invisible ‘Addiction’

We are currently working on a project around stigma and gambling. Stigma is the cause of much of the extra anguish to add to the pains of suffering from gambling harm. It leads to shame, guilt, and a fear of admitting to problems or seeking help.

When your GP routinely asks you about your drinking habits you may lie, give a lower or much lower figure than your actual intake. You don’t want a lecture perhaps, but more than this you are ashamed about how your drinking is ‘out of control’. Ashamed, because only weak people are not in control of their behaviours. Ashamed because you are now outside the norms of decent society. Ashamed because, whatever the success of anti-stigma campaigns, you carry within you, have learned, that ‘addicts’ are bad, worthless, irresponsible. The felt stigma will vary between individuals but some groups will feel it more. A Muslim will have violated their religious and community codes for instance. A woman is likely to feel strongly the stigmas against female ‘drunks’ and ‘alkies’ and ‘lushes’: women are ‘supposed to be@ good mothers, home makers, protectors of children.

You can do all the high-poered, expensive, expert data gathering, analysis and statistical interpretation you like. You won’t be able to include figures for the unknown population of people suffering badly but who feel impelled to keep it to themselves.

Gambling Careers

There has been a welcome move towards valuing the voices of ‘Experts by Experience’ – in health generally and mental health specifically. (It is still not obvious to too many by the way that suffering from gambling harms is a mental health condition. We have a long way to go before health institutions not only stop talking about ‘mental health and addiction services’ but also incorporate a clear understanding into their core values and outlooks). Promisingly,Experts by Experience are involved in a dynamic involvement with health services, professionals from many fields, politics, shaping policy, media. Many individuals go on to find work in the ‘recovery’ field. Others volunteers support groups and peer to peer mentorships. Many are involved with campaigning – and some say that such involvement helps their own recovery.

There is another crucial point to focusing upon the individual. As we saw above, there are many different populations of gamblers, and no such thing as a blank-faced ‘problem gambler’ occupying a ghetto called ‘problem gamblers’. At individual level, the need to think of the whole-person should be obvious. Sensitivity to a woman’s experiences is useful with caution; but much greater sensitivity to that particular human woman is more important. We have to take away the boxes we put people into, the labels we use, the blinkered views our pre-judgments may entail. We have to be sensitive to life story, life situation, health, co-occurring harms such as substance dependence syndromes. What we can never do is think of AN addict. To label someone is to dehumanise them. To label someobody with the word ‘addict’ is horrible. It’s a word loaded with negative, highly stigmatising violence. If we have to use the word at all – as we will do as long as there are ‘mental health and addiction services’ – we should strike it through. ~~ADDICT~~.

During an individual’s gambling career there will be enormous variations between people. Some may gamble only on certain occasions but do so in a way in which they can severely harm themselves and others. Some may go weeks, months, years without gambling and then ‘relapse’. Others gamble every day and lose every day. Some turn to crime to fund their gambling. A person who has rarely gambled may bet on a certainty one night and los etheir home. An old person may become ill with cold and malnutrition because she spends a good part of her meagre pension on scratchcards. Faced with trauma, redundancy, depression or just boredom someone may turn to gambling – for the experience of gambling is itself an escape into a sealed-off world where anxieties cease. A person with bipolar, in a manic or hypomanic phase may gamble recklessly. (It’s estimated that bipolar individuals have a 50% greater risk of gambling harms than the general population). A gang of of mates drinking and betting fiercely on their mobiles as a football game proceeds on television may introduce to gambling the new member of the group who wants to ‘fit in’. All the kids in school are gambling, your parents are gambling and you want to be grownup.

There is no typical career. But it should be said that a relatively casual ‘low risk’ gambler can hit the buffers at any time when conditions are there. Glasgow University Gambling Research Group is currently engaged in a three years project talking to many individuals about their ‘gambling careers’. The study does make use of the term ‘problem gamblers’ which is a phrase that carries with it some unfortunate negative connotations; however, it understands that there are very many gambling behaviours and harms, and degrees of harm, the crucial importance of individual life factors, so implicitly undermines any concept of a typical ‘problem gambler’:

Rather than viewing problem gamblers as a relatively small and distinct group, the study will look at problematic behaviour as a particular phase that can affect many more individuals at some point(s) in a gambling career, and will examine the way that behaviour waxes and wanes among this larger group. It will focus on key moments and processes of change such as, for example, how people begin gambling, points when playing increases or decreases, when individuals realise they have a problem and decide to seek help – or not – and the circumstances that surround this.

Experiences of treatment: perceptions of its benefits, as well as relapses and reasons for leaving it, will also be explored. Given that the vast majority of problem gamblers never seek treatment, the research will focus in particular on the phase of ‘natural recovery’ in which problematic behaviour is resolved without formal intervention, and will explore shifts in social, demographic and personal circumstances that are associated with it.

This article has tried:

to demonstrate that the government and the Gambling Commission are seeking new ways to gather a better and more accurate view of the prevalence of gambling harms.
to suggest that calls for ‘evidence’ and ‘facts’ are based on innocent and naive misunderstandings, or else are being used as rhetoric against the ‘hysteria’ of ‘gambling prohibitionists’.
to sketch out some of the crucial differences between population studies versus the experiences of individuals.
to outline some of the issues around the term ‘evidence’ and show that it is by no means a simple ‘innocent’ word.

Where does GAMBLING EDUCATION fit in?

Article by Adrian Bailey, Director, The Machine Zone

This is a long post, sorry! Skip the preamble/disclaimer by all means.

PREAMBLE/Disclaimer

This post is a ‘light touch’ consideration of some of the questions arising around the idea of gambling education. The introduction below gives some background and points to some of the major questions.

It’s good to start, though, by stating firmly what this article isn’t. It doesn’t and couldn’t offer criticism of the many gambling education initiatives currently running. It doesn’t claim to be other than very tentative. It claims no expertise.

It does try to highlight questions underlying all approaches to gambling education. This highlighting is drawn from existing practitioners and theorists for whom such questions have always been basic.

I taught in secondary schools and then further education back in the 70s and 80s. During this time I was also engaged in educational research. I’ve never been a gambler but I have had a serious addiction and severe and enduring mental health problem. After teaching I worked in the mental health field, and in the last seven years of paid employment I worked with people recovering from various compulsive behaviours. Only in the past three years have I become familiar with the area of gambling.

Through work and personal experience I have ‘researched’ (as an ‘educated layperson’) mental health, and ‘addiction’. Like many of you I don’t like that word, ‘addiction’ but for convenience will use it here. Regard it as no more than a signpost to what we may prefer to call by less stigmatised words, and even these are only signposts to the area of personal experiences.

These experiences are painful to individuals and their immediate networks. They relate to great social costs – economic costs, of course, but also serious negative repercussions upon the health and wellbeing of society. As such, they are public health issues in the widest sense. Because of this they are political issues too. Governments allocate funding for treatment, research and more; governments also, by attending – or not attending – to the issues raised suggest the priority – or lack of priority – of the issues raised and the allocation of resources.

Since it is a political issue, it is of concern to all citizens. In a democracy, a childless citizen has the right to be engaged with education. Someone who is young and healthy will engage with the health and social care policies of government, and provision for aging people. We may be materially well-off but have the right to challenge the existence in our own country of poverty and inequality. Concern for military horrors witnessed across the world gives every citizen the right to ask of the government’s foreign policy questions about arms sales it allows. So, you don’t have to be an ‘addict’, or mentally distressed or otherwise in pain to be involved, any more than you need to be a child in poverty to care about child poverty.

So, while having a specific interest in mental health and what is called addiction, by engagement with gambling education is as a concerned citizen. I can’t see any way of framing this as other than political.

Like most important issues, complexity encourages a wide variety of approaches and attitudes. As an interested citizen layperson I follow expert understandings of due humility.

As the philosopher William Irwin has written:

We ought to regularly and open-mindedly reconsider (alternative opinions and approaches) if only to remind ourselves why we believe what we believe.

INTRODUCTION

Gambling and gaming have been around since history began. Today we see a very wide spectrum. Truly, many millions do enjoy a ‘harmless flutter’ on a lottery or bet. Some buy scratch cards at £2 or £10 a time. It’s fun! Even without money we enjoy games of chance, the throw of a dice. Kids like me bet by throwing coins against a wall, then got into cards along with the cigarettes behind the bike shed. I’m sure kids still do. It’s something we learned in school but not from teachers. From our mates and the culture of kids passed on from one generation to the next.

If you’re on unemployment benefit or a low income, ten pounds can take a chunk out of basic living costs. Power, rent, food, council tax, presents for the kids. Even what looks like a small amount can have serious consequences. When people become hooked on gambling, often people in well-paid jobs or with good incomes, they can lose many thousands, even millions of pounds. Some – tragically – are driven to suicide. Others steal from their employers and end up in jail.

In the last ten years we’ve all become aware of the damage gambling can do. In response, a 2019 survey of the general public done by the Gambling Commission found that 27% of people think it would be best if ALL gambling were banned, while 82% agree that there are too many gambling opportunities today. The media regularly report on the often tragic impact of gambling on some individuals. For instance, in July 2020 The Guardian headlined a story: ‘How the Gambling Industry Got its Claws into Kids’. Former gamblers have initiated many organisations which document individuals’ stories; these are pressure groups, campaigners aiming to bring about fundamental changes in regulation, advertising and marketing, and the ‘addictive’ nature of some gambling products. Their work is mirrored in that of many academic researchers. Politicians from all parties have been and remain intent upon bringing about reform.

The industry, whose biggest members are represented by the Gaming and Betting Council, and its supporters point out that millions of people enjoy having ‘a harmless flutter’. It distinguishes between what it claims is a ‘small number’ of ‘problem gamblers’ from the vast majority of ‘responsible gamblers’. The industry also directly funds harm-prevention organisations such as Gamble Aware and thereby directs some of its 1% voluntary levy towards education and treatment. Several campaigns which we’ll discuss elsewhere are demanding a compulsory 1% levy with all monies ringfenced by government to fund completely independent research, education and treatment. Against this, campaigners have claimed that concentrating upon education and treatment, while important areas (in particular, treatment which is greatly under-resourced or provided), can lead to neglect or disguising of vital systemic issues such as product design, marketing and advertising, regulatory issues and conscious exploitation of vulnerable psychological attributes of the human being. Such a claim is also made at various levels by academic researchers. Rather than develop this tension here, I’ve appended some web addresses at the end to give you an idea of such research.

Education about health, finance, citizenship, alcohol and other drugs, mental health and all the other things that relate to our wellbeing is not only confined to schools and other formal education settings. Nor is it limited to youth. Public Health campaigns mount many informal educational projects. The mental health sector provides very many sources of guidance, information and learning. And, of course, kids learn from their parents, their peer group and the culture they live in – probably in some important ways far more than they learn in school. We also learn from social media. We learn from the mass media: in particular, popular music is a potent source of learning; so is television. Taking the latter, a ‘soap opera’ with a storyline about gambling or other mental health problems can provide more powerful learning than in formal settings. We also learn from advertisements and marketing. We learn, for instance, that Product X is fun, or will make us happy. Not all learning benefits us. Some addiction experts believe that an addiction is learned behaviour (as opposed to some sort of disease).

But here we’ll focus on school education, and in particular education about gambling. This is normally provided by what’s known in England and Wales as Personal, Social, Health and Economic education. This is a developing area. There is a very active PSHE association which, as well as providing resources and curriculum discussion, lobbies for greater weight and training to be given to the area. They have some excellent guidance for teaching about gambling, The extract below demonstrates just one aspect of the theory and practice of gambling education and its complexity if it’s to be considered thoroughly. The extract also demonstrates some aspects of gambling education lacking in certain other current approaches:

Understanding of gambling industry strategies to draw people in and keep them gambling, including those that exploit natural human biases and errors

Dark nudges — a term used by researcher Philip Newall— describe the techniques gambling organisationsuse to encourage participation in gambling. Researchers suggest the gambling industry utilises arange of techniques including:

- - Normalisation of gambling behaviours, particularly bycreating a perception that it is a key part of enjoyingsport entertainment

- - Legitimisation through partnering with trusted organisations(to convey the impression that gamblingis accepted by those known to be ethical)

- - Extensive advertising with particular focus on vulnerablegroups

- - ‘Free bet’ promotions and ‘welcome back’ bonuses
  - Encroachment into gaming including throughnon-monetary forms, e.g. ‘loot boxes’
  - Over-emphasising a distinction between problem and responsible gambling — encouraging people to think of themselves as responsible gamblers
  - Adverts and encouragement to bet on highly specificevents where participants are less likely to win (e.g.first goal scorer or specific scoreline)

- - Additional techniques are used in online gambling:
  - Use of ‘near miss’ outcomes exploit the human bias to try again if someone has a near miss
  - Losses disguised as partial wins (with audio and visual prompts to support this)
  - Meaningless ‘bells, whistles and associations’ makeuse of the human tendency to search for meaning in patterns

It is plausible that helping young people to become aware of these techniques can help them to be moreresilient to them.

Understanding of gambling risks and harms

Most gambling education programmes aimed at adolescents include a component on gambling’s risks and harms. This would seem an inherent part of enabling young people’s informed decision-making. Two caveats however merit highlighting: first, the recent review of school-based gambling education programmes concluded that ‘promoting a negative viewpoint of gambling and its associated consequences are not sufficient to prevent gambling problems’— therefore this should only be a component rather than the entirety of gambling education.

Second, some young people may find risks enticing rather than aversive, linked to developmental differences in perceptions and responses to risk42, so how risks are presented and discussed is important.

from How to address gambling through PSHE education

It’s important to note that the PSHE work with Gamble Aware (funded by the industry). Some have felt that any funding from industry is not permissible but the PSHE – and Gamble Aware itself – have shown repeatedly that this is not necessarily the case.

In the extract above, young people are introduced to the role of industry in gambling harms. It’s noticeable too that the sort of education mooted here is not restricted to standalone sessions. As per government advice on all PSHE it can be integrated into the whole school curriculum. English/media education (analysing advertisements), mathematics (odds and risks) for instance. The PSHE experts are fully aware of age and development needs. One also has to consider learning disabled pupils. There is an emphasis (as there should be in all teaching) on teacher delivery. Research has shown what doesn’t work and may have effects opposite to what is intended. This includes being very careful about inviting former gamblers to speak: a totally unintentional outcome may be to make gambling risks attractive. The idea that most people can gamble without problems and only a few run into trouble is dangerous too. Scaring young people is very dangerous: many young people have ‘heard it all before’ about the terrible harms of alcohol, cannabis junk food: such scare stories conflict with their deeper learning from ‘real life’. Gambling education should not be parachuted in to occupy a few sessions like a magic pill or injection: it should be part of a carefully integrated whole school developmental curriculum. Lessons should be participatory and interactive: few teachers these days (hopefully) talk at their students or expect them to magically absorb wisdom from texts.

The purpose of the foregoing has been to suggest that providing education about gambling is complex and requires expertise. One may also hope that educationists are the key providers of curriculum design, delivery and evaluation – which is far from the case presently. Education cannot be some simple panacea that can be ‘injected’ into a young person’s mind. In a school it also requires commitment from senior management to PSHE generally to design a developmental curriculum. It seems unlikely at present that delivery is optimal in all schools. Elsewhere, after training about gambling education (often a one day or less session) teachers have felt unprepared – or faced with an only choice of delivering a handful of discrete sessions to students.

Implementing gambling education requires theory partly based on what has been learned about teaching about other risky behaviours. Such research has looked at other countries. In the UK, the Alcohol Education Trust which works with the PSHE Association, founded in 2010, provides a promising future for what gambling education may achieve. The AET has had the time needed to evaluate programmes – and give statistically significant indicators of positive impact on students’ drinking behaviours. The gambling education field is new. It is, therefore, difficult for evaluation of particular programmes (the AET does compare its own work with others’). Nevertheless, by virtue of existing at all, the importance of very enthusiastic and well-managed projects contributes to establishing gambling education ‘on the agenda’. Good work is being done in this area by a few initiatives as well as the PSHE itself as ‘insiders’ with the power to link to other organisations and provide specific expertise. In Scotland, FastForward with its emphasis on peer group participatory workshops, theatre and a harm minimisation approach has a gambling hub to complement its work in health, risk and wellbeing. Many other projects continue to occur regionally, initiated by a range of organisations. However, such work is spread thinly, delivery is often flawed and there have been no informed research projects to evaluate programmes. They may, after all, be at best an expensive waste of time, and at worst counter-productive.

There are many obstacles to overcome and many contradictory approaches that need evaluating but education about gambling is growing and driven by enthusiasm and a wide, varied skills base.

HOWEVER!

There’s always a ‘but’! Here are some questions I think are important though I make no attempt to answer them.

1. Within the context of all factors contributing to gambling harms is ‘gambling education’ emphasised too much and thus working to divert attention from other important factors?
2. Given the current state of gambling education which offers promise but has many basic difficulties associated with it (as suggested above) is it likely to be a significant player in reducing gambling harm?
3. How, when and by whom will gambling education programmes be evaluated and compared?
4. How, when and by whom will gambling education within school curricula be evaluated?
5. Which approaches to risky behaviours that have been evaluated in PSHE could potentially inform gambling education? What, if any, evidence is there that education about drugs, alcohol and tobacco has been effective?
6. Should gambling education be positioned and weighted within an integrated national policy for reducing harms?
7. Given that a fifth of school leavers are ‘functionally illiterate’ is there scope for informal youth education to reach young people? (Functional illiteracy refers to minimal literacy, insufficient for full functioning in life such as ability to comprehend more than very basic texts).
8. Given that 49% of the working age population have numeracy levels less that those expected of a primary school child (National Numeracy) is it realistic to assume that all pupils will be able to engage with such things as odds, percentages etc. in delivery of gambling education?
9. Gambling problems can affect anybody but since there will be a demographic sector correlating with (7) and (8), hence less reachable by education and less capable of understanding fully the architecture of gambling, does such a group represent a vulnerable sector at risk of exploitation?
10. Could it be that calls for ‘education’ are based upon a naive and simplistic understanding of both education and the prevention of gambling harms? Or is there scope to examine any potentials for education about gambling? If current provision may be wasteful of time and money, may be ineffective or counter-productive, where are the spaces to highlight this and who will do so?

Some Links

The Shills are Alive

CJCENTRAL

Many people die each year of gambling-related causes in the UK. This much is not only true but is the driving force behind this post. I’ve not lost anyone but I’m grateful that no-one lost me. Or maybe they did when I was lost in the fog. Who knows? But let’s get back looking forward.

We also have an increasing number of disordered gamblers. There is no report from any source that will shift that view. How can anyone tell me how many disordered gamblers there are when most, if not all, spend most of their time lying about it? If I’m not telling those closest to me my best kept secrets,then I’m hardly going to tell a stranger from Ipsos Mori or whoever else is feeding the Gambling Commission with pointless answers. You can just imagine…

“We asked 100 people, do you have a gambling disorder?”

So if we…

View original post 451 more words

Some Statistics about Perceived Profits by Gamblers

Alarming UK Gambling Statistics, Sports Betting Data & Research 2021

Whit’s Happening? Issue 10

Fresh from COPE Scotland is Issue 10 of the regular magazine of resources, tips, news and articles about mental health. Check it out here.

This new edition includes a digital inclusion section which has a really good feature by Carnegie, Learning from Lockdown: 12 steps to eliminate digital exclusion.

Also in the magazine:

Stigma and the Invisible ‘Addiction’

Gambling Careers

PREAMBLE/Disclaimer

INTRODUCTION

HOWEVER!

Some Links

Education Organisations

Parliament

Gambling Commission (3 year strategy for reducing harms)

Public Health

Some Academics

Media