Study links gambling and suicide

DON QUIXOTE NOTE: Alberta has $84 million a year available for gambling help programs while the Province of B.C. chips in $8 million per year.

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Tom Blackwell, National Post : Monday, October 29, 2007

Pathological gamblers are almost four times more likely than the average Canadian to try to kill themselves, concludes a new study that adds to the growing health-related controversy around the government-run casino industry.Anti-gambling and safety advocates have long warned that problem gambling can lead to suicide, with some limited research to back up their concerns. The study just published by the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry is based on a nationwide survey of 36,000 Canadians, and found a strong connection between compulsive betting and self-harm. Although the research cannot prove a cause-and-effect relationship, it raises significant public health concerns, said the paper spearheaded by Stephen Newman, a psychiatry professor at the University of Alberta."Over the past decade, the gambling industry has expanded dramatically in Canada," notes the study."Many observers are concerned about the societal, family and personal problems following in the wake of this unprecedented growth. "This study demonstrates that there is an association between gambling, when taken to excess, and self-harm," the study says.

The research comes after the same journal published a study a month earlier that found emergency-room visits for gambling-related psychiatric problems in Quebec jumped by 50% in the late 1990s as the gaming boom took off.Government-run casinos, lotteries and other gambling products pulled in net revenue last year of $13.3-billion -- up from $2.7-billion in 1992 -- while 69% of households reported at least one gambling activity, Statistics Canada says. Experts estimate that as many as 4% of adult Canadians have a gambling problem. Some authorities have begun tracking suicides where gambling appeared to have been a factor, but evidence of the scope of the problem is still sketchy. The Canada Safety Council has estimated that more than 200 Canadians a year take their own lives because of gambling habits.A class-action suit against the Atlantic Lottery Corp. was launched this year by Keith and Catherine Piercey, whose daughter, Susan, killed herself in 2003 after a spate of rampant VLT gambling that led to theft and heavy debt.

"The more people are becoming exposed to gambling, the more people are developing problems," said Sol Boxenbaum of Viva Consulting, a Montreal-based counsellor. "Because they don't know how to deal with the problem, out of desperation and hopelessness they attempt suicide."Dr. Newman and colleagues analyzed results of the 2002 Canadian Community Health Survey, a survey of 36,000 adults by Statistics Canada that included questions around gambling and suicide.After filtering out other possible factors, such as depression and alcoholism, the researchers concluded that pathological gamblers were 3.4 times more likely than the norm to attempt suicide.Such research is akin to the body of evidence that scientists began accumulating about 50 years ago on the dangers of smoking, said Brian Yealland, spokesman for the advocacy group Gambling Watch.

"Everybody wanted to run around and deny [tobacco's links to cancer] and finally the science weighed in too heavily," he said. "That's always been my feeling with this, that as we get credible research showing what the effects are, it causes us some fairly high levels of alarm." A spokeswoman for one provincial gaming company, however, said her organization recognizes the downside of the pastime and puts great emphasis on preventing gambling troubles. The Alberta Lottery and Gaming Commission, which both regulates the industry and runs many gaming facilities in the province, is even opening up kiosks at its casinos to highlight the risks of excessive gambling, the commission's Marilyn Carlyle-Helms said.The agency hands over $84-million a year to the Alberta Drug and Alcohol Commission's gambling program, has a self-exclusion program for addicted customers, includes education messages on its video machines and recently sponsored Responsible Gambling Awareness Week. "Government takes the issue of problem gambling very seriously. We're doing a tremendous amount on many fronts," she said. "At the end of the day, we want people to be able to keep gambling fun."