Study links gambling and suicide

Monday, 19 November 2007

According to an academic article written by two University of Alberta researchers, gambling addicts are about 3.4 times more likely to attempt suicide than the average Canadian.

Dr Angus Thompson, a former U of A professor now with the Department of Public Health at Flinders University in Australia, along with Dr Stephen Newman, a psychiatry professor at the U of A, wrote the paper linking gambling and suicide based on data taken from the Canadian Community Health Survey.

The survey, which interviewed almost 37 000 Canadians ages 15 and up, discusses various issues impacting health, from mental illnesses to unemployment. Thompson and Newman also took information from a previous study they’d done in 2003 that assessed over 7000 adults from Edmonton on similar topics.

“This study of a very large number of Canadians, coupled with our earlier investigation [...], showed a very simple and important fact: that suicidal behaviour, mental illness, and severe gambling problems are interrelated,” Thompson said. “Our studies were the first, we believe, to show [the relationship] in a community sample, which is much less biased than observations on a clinical sample or than recollections or hearsay.”

By analyzing these two studies, Thompson and Newman concluded that very serious or “pathological” gamblers are more likely to have suicidal thoughts or to have had attempted suicide in the past.

“Having ruled out the influence of a number of other factors, we still found that the odds for a suicide attempt are about 3.4 times higher among pathological gamblers than among others,” he said.

According to the Problem Gambling Resources Network of Alberta (PGRN), the gambling industry has become a billion-dollar business in Alberta, growing at an alarmingly fast rate since 1990. PGRN, which funds and works with programs like the Alberta Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission (AADAC), has noted the need for public awareness since gambling addiction in children even as young as twelve has continually increased since 2002. However, Thompson stressed that in order to solve the increasing gambling problem, it is not sufficient to focus on causes of gambling addiction alone.

“Other studies have shown that most social problems are, in fact, related. So, the trick might be to find out what underpins them all, rather than focusing on separate causes for gambling, suicide, substance abuse, and so on,” Thompson said.

He added that although the paper, based on data from the two studies, only correlates pathological gambling and suicide and doesn’t show cause-and-effect, this study is the evidence many anti-gambling establishments have been waiting for. Thompson said when the data initially included other possible factors of suicide attempts that aren’t specifically gambling but are usually associated with gambling addictions—for example, alcoholism, mental health problems, and economic instability—people were 8.5 times more likely to have attempted suicide.

Thompson added that overall, the study suggests the increasing number and promotion of casinos is basically adding salt to the gambling wound, and that reducing the amount of pathological gamblers starts with decreasing exposure to gambling institutions.

“The evidence overall is that gambling in the form of casinos is a social evil, and because of its [...] addictive nature, it is not about freedom of choice,” Thompson said. “Gambling is not about the exercise of free choice in the way we ordinarily conceive it—at least [not] any more than it is for an addict taking heroin or an alcoholic having another drink.”

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