The Dangers of Gambling

Gambling involves risking money or other items of value on the outcome of a game involving chance, such as on scratchcards or fruit machines or by betting with friends. If you predict the outcome correctly, you win money. If you don’t, you lose the amount you risked. Gambling can be fun and exciting, but it’s important to remember that there are risks involved. It can also affect your health, relationships and work or study performance.

Many people with gambling problems try to hide their problem from others or try to manage it on their own. These individuals may experience social and psychological problems such as depression, low self-esteem, impulsiveness, anxiety or paranoia, and suicidal thoughts. In extreme cases, these feelings can escalate into physical and emotional violence against the person’s significant other or themselves. In addition, the financial burdens of problem gambling can have a negative effect on a person’s family, children and other loved ones.

Individuals with a gambling problem come from all backgrounds and from every type of community. They can be rich or poor, male or female, young or old, educated or not. However, they all share one thing in common: They have a problem with gambling. Problem gambling can affect anyone, at any time and in any circumstances.

In the past, some people have been viewed as ‘problem gamblers’ instead of a mental health issue, but research has shown that pathological gambling is similar to substance abuse and should be classified as a psychological disorder (American Psychiatric Association, 1980, 1987, 1994). As a result, it is now commonly recognised that gambling disorders are an illness.

While calculating economic costs of gambling is relatively straightforward, calculating social impacts on society/community level is more difficult because they are nonmonetary in nature. These include the invisible individual and external costs of gambling, such as the impact on family members and societal harms such as petty theft and illicit lending.

It’s also important to remember that gambling is not a way to make money, but it is a form of entertainment. Therefore, it’s essential to start with a fixed amount of money that you are prepared to lose and never exceed this limit. It’s also advisable to avoid betting on high-risk sports events, as they can be very costly in the long run.

In the past, some studies have attempted to quantify the benefits of gambling by estimating consumer surplus, but this method is inherently arbitrary as it places an artificial monetary value on something that cannot be measured in monetary terms. Similarly, when studies focus only on problem gambling and ignore positive impacts, they underestimate the true cost to society [41]. The most effective approach is to adopt a public health perspective, which recognizes all harmful and beneficial impacts of gambling across its severity spectrum. Using this methodology will allow researchers and policymakers to compare the costs and benefits of different gambling policies and decide which would reduce harms and increase gains.