"More than 70 per cent of gambling disorder emergency department visits involved another mental health condition or heavy substance use and almost one-third of the visits led to hospital admission."
Ok, so I assume they mean that these emergency visits were for things like drug overdoses and psychotic episodes in people led to by their gambling disorders, not for the gambling disorders themselves. What a strange way of writing this up. A gambling disorder is a chronic problem, not an acute one.
There's a difference between "emergency visit for X" where you treat X and "emergency visit (for Y) because of X" where you treat Y proximal to X, and people could learn to be more discerning in their use and interpretation of language.
Maybe they also mean suicidality after ending up in a ton of debt? Or just other self-harm because of it?
Personally, I really don’t like the expansion of legalized gambling. I’m not surprised it’s causing serious issues.
I would at least be more OK if it happened but advertising was heavily restricted/banned in context. The fact that every professional sport seems to be nothing but a thin wrapper around gambling ads now can’t possibly be good for us as a society.
emergency department visits in which a gambling disorder was recorded as either the main or a contributing reason for the visit.
from the study
An ED visit for a gambling disorder was defined on the basis of the clinical judgement of the treating team and was identified when ICD-10 codes F63.0 (pathological gambling) or Z726 (gambling or betting problems) were coded as the main or contributing reason for the visit.
In 29.3% of these ED visits, a gambling disorder was listed as the primary cause of the visit,
Also, the ICD ontology specifically exists for billing purposes and isn't the same as patient diagnostic classification, though there is overlap and people do mistakenly use it as such sometimes. But there's a difference between "emergency visit for X" (treat X) and "emergency visit because of X" (treat Y proximal to X). (I also edited my original comment to include this last part, since it seems likely to create confusion)
there's a difference in semantics between clinical reason and billing, agreed, though it seems that the news article did not sensationalize the study, and the study uses at least one valid code that can be a primary reason for a visit, and while I'm absolutely just a random dog on the internet, for me the overlap in meaning seems significant to warrant the use of this term.
The paper lists the mental health conditions as "anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorders, self-harm, acute stress
reaction and other". I'm surprised that multiple people went into the ER to seek treatment for a gambling addiction without being flagged for anything else. It seems like there should be a better place for people looking for help to go.
Our incredible brains are easily high-jacked. Another concerning trend in global/societal mental health that stresses different parts of it (e.g. increased ER visits). If the entirety of humanity is a connected mind let's say, and more and more parts of it are being damaged by companies that capitalize on "flaws" in the human brain -- which means our shared mentality keeps weakening and can be exploited more and more. It's just so much easier now because there is a machine in your pocket full of endless ways to high-jack your mind and attention.
We live in really crazy/fascinating times, accelerating human problems at "internet scale".
It is interesting how we actually ended up forming societies and cultures with how many little broken things occur in our minds. I guess as the saying goes "What doesn't kill you leaves you a hollow broken shell to pump out more copies of your DNA".
maybe its the other way around. my wife and I are pretty 'special', but when we step in to try to make up the different for each other we're a little more basically functional.
Organizing into communities and societies is absolutely what has allowed humanity to prosper beyond the sum of its parts. Our propensity for both idealism and shame, while being deeply intertwined with our vulnerability to highjacking, are also things that allow us to imagine something better and strive to achieve it. There's nothing that brings out shame better than the presence of other people, and nothing more inspiring than working well together with others towards a common goal.
There is also the direction of influencing those in charge of creating laws and orders and ways to prevent society from collapsing. Law makers who give in to lobbying -- I mean some of these prices points are quite low: $XX,XXX to get someone to vote "yes" for a thing that impacts millions of constituents and earns the lobbying orders of magnitude more than the payout. That is excellent ROI.
Yeah it is so absurd. The going cost of a politician in local California politics is on the order of $30-60k a year. Very inexpensive when they vote on policies shaping billions of dollars worth of sales.
Because these problems have never been dealt with. We scold victims and sell this "individual responsibility"/"bootstraps" bullshit to avoid doing so. Some of us create these products that actively fuck with people's ability to make decisions well, and then we yell at those people and tell them to act right.
The only difference now is the Internet both makes it frictionless and therefore so much easier to do, and the Internet also then let's us see into the lives being ruined in the process. But the problem remains exactly the same: if you, as a person, have no ethics and see no issue in causing misery at scale, you can make a LOT of fucking money in our society. And not only will you likely not be charged, now they'll probably call you an innovator and put you on a magazine.
And then we wonder why everything is getting worse all the time.
And before anyone tries the gotcha with me, no I do not work at any firm like this. No gambling, no social media, no recommendation algorithms. The company I work at comes by it honestly: we sell solutions to problems people actually have. And no we're not worth 66 trillion dollars but, we can all sleep at night. And that's not so bad.
Practically any entertainment product is going to have problem users(food products too, along with alcohol and other drugs).
There are people who play video games to excess or watch tv to excess and it is harmful to them, but that really needs to be balanced against the vast majority of users that exercise reasonable restraint. Its just not a fair justification to ban things that 99.9%+ of users are about to operate responsibly.
In 2024, Ontarians wagered $82.7 billion CAD on these sites through 2.6 million player accounts.
Truly astounding numbers. Without a doubt, online gambling is the most preventable public health crisis of our generation. None of this had any business getting legalized.
It's a long tail. The vast majority make $20 parlay wagers here and there and they're the real cash cow. And then there are the degens that make $2,000, or $5,000 wagers on everything because otherwise "what's the point?".
Short of outright banning (which I would favor), we can at least make mobile wagers capped at say $100 and the same account can't wager more that $500 within a 24 hour period.
That would allow people to have their fun but seriously limit the blast radius when they inevitably lose big repeatedly.
The vast majority make $20 parlay wagers here and there and they're the real cash cow.
You got the meaning of "whale" wrong. The majority of the winnings / losings come from the "long tail" addicts.
And then there are the degens that make $2,000, or $5,000 wagers on everything because [they are addicted]
I think my edit more accurately reflects what is going on.
You need to put more time into the proposal if you want to make it serious. How long would it take for people to learn they need "alt accounts" to gamble?
Suggestions:
1. Ban advertising of gambling.
2. Ban "remote" gambling including phone apps.
What would it take to make progress on this in the current regulatory environment? Post a link to someone who has thought about it.
The gross amount doesn't tell you how much money is being lost to gambling. I'm not going to soften that wording, it really is lost, but such a shocking gross amount means the average loss is in the thousands per year. Gambling is also the archetypal whale hunt. Your best customers are harmed most by your product.
There's nothing else that delivers that level of harm directly to a device in your pocket.
It also could be inflated due to winnings being put back into another bet. A single dollar could be accounted for multiple times if used in multiple bets.
Not that I am saying that this number is ok, gambling is a net negative on any society.
Basically printing money just like tobacco companies used to be (and now are again with smokeless products). I'm not generally in favor of morality police laws, but this is so egregious it's beyond morality to me- it's vulnerable peoples' firmware getting exploited to give predatory actors their money.
That figure seemed way off to me (gut response) so I did a tiny bit of digging: Ontario claims income (primary household income) for 2024 was $791B. ~10% isn't as shocking as I expected.
By transaction volume yes. Presumably it’s not all spending though, if you regularly win back some of that money. The same dollar is probably wagered multiple times before it is lost.
Ontario lotteries pay out about 58 cents per dollar in, so that's still $13,000 annually out-of-pocket for a total spend of $31,000. That's crazy money.
Sportsbooks typically pay back more like 90%, brick and mortar casinos 90%-99% depending on the game. I don't know what Ontario mandates for regulated online casinos, but I'd guess they're at the high end of that and focus on volume, return custom and dark patterns rather than extreme house edge.
If it's 98%, the average household loses 0.2% of their income gambling.
Wagering 10% of your household income is not shocking?? What would it take to shock you? That is an astounding amount.
Most people are living paycheck to paycheck. I've watched gambling destroy more than one family member's lives.
To put this number in context: estimate 1/3 of income for rent, so this is 1/3 of their rent?! Translating that to my own rent is an amount that would immediately lead me to quit forever.
It's both better and worse than it seems. I'm guessing something like 50% of folks gamble $0. Then another 45% gamble some amount of their income, averaging 10%. Finally 5% will gamble everything they have and send their family careening into poverty.
Important context that many of these dollars are counted multiple times.
Ex: you bet 100 and win, bringing your holdings to 200. You bet another 100 and lose, back to 100. You’ve gambled $200 but have arrived at the same number you started with.
I have friends who gamble in excess of 100k/yr total. In general their net is +/- 3k. $3,000 is a lot to spend on a hobby, but the overall number can be misleading
We don’t have to fully outlaw gambling or other forms of high risk entertainment, but we absolutely should be outlawing the pervasive advertising these companies are doing. You can’t enjoy sports these days without dodging tons of ads for betting platforms
I haven't looked much into the Canadian levels, but I assume they are similar to the US. Some stats might not be quite right, but...
Something like .15% of the US population skydive a year. Almost none of them die.
I've seen estimates that over 5% of the US population gamble at a "problem" level and about 0.5% to 1% are outright addicted. About 20% of those addicted have a suicide attempt.
Americans who skydive in the US will be about the same number of Americans who attempt suicide due to gambling issues. Skydiving is quite safe so the death rate is so minimal.
Because there is a significant amount of externalized costs we should increase the impedance: taxes, banning/regulating advertising, cooling off periods, limits, et cetera.
Consider the possibility that your brain chemistry is different from that of other people, and that this could affect the level of responsibility people bring to bear here.
I'd settle for making these apps play fair at least. Being able to effectively ban users who are good at sports betting by limiting their wagers to trivial amounts[1] is a "heads we win, tails you lose" situation and contradicts their marketing claims.
Unfortunately I fail to empathise with gamblers not because I think they deserve to be afflicted by this disease but simply because I have never found gambling appealing as an activity.
I bought a few lottery tickets when the prize reaches astronomical proportions but it was always a case of going along and doing it with family/friends just for fun.
I guess I could understand the appeal if the chances to actually win something were pretty good but it’s a well known fact that the house always wins in the end.
I fail to empathise with gamblers [...] because I have never found gambling appealing as an activity.
that was a strange sentence to read! the whole point with empathy is being able to do it despite not sharing the same feelings or point of view. it's putting yourself in their shoes, and attempting to understand the things they would feel.
maybe you meant you can't "relate to" or "identify with" or something
I have never felt anything about gambling. Most boring thing ever. I don't feel anything about investment, and wrote automation to track mine because it's all so boring.
I wouldn't tempt fate to try to expose myself more, but it doesn't seem like I contain whatever is required to form these addictions.
Has it been studied if some people are just much more vulnerable than others, and are there predictive factors?
I feel the same way - it's just not fun for me. I like playing poker with my friends, but I like the social aspect of it - putting down $20 on the table is no different than buying a few beers at a bar, and I don't care if I come out of the game with more or less money.
Going to a casino, which I've done a few times, is just wildly disinteresting.
But I know I'm prone to other sorts of addictions, so I guess gambling is somehow different.
I like alcohol and trying new things, whether that be food or languages. I get nothing from gambling. Not all stimuli affect everyone equally. You’d need something approaching a unified theory of consciousness to adequately explain this finely.
is the sense that it wont immediately bankrupt you, yes, they are different.
but my skimming of the study itself is that something else occurs (mental episode of some sort, such as anxiety attacks or suicide attempts, etc.) and gambling is noted as a primary or contributing factor in the billing code. it does not appear like someone wakes up, realizes they have an addiction to gambling, and then walks into the ER.
the reason i brought up cost is because gambling addicts having a mental crisis are not typically sitting on piles of cash. a canadian gambling addict would be more willing to visit the ER than a us one because of the cost of the visit.
the pay vs. wait argument is a fun one, but im not super interested in hashing it out here
Maybe, maybe not. Our system is based on triage so if you are in dire need you go first.
A few years ago I thought I broke some ribs in a snowboarding accident (turns out it was just 3 cracked ribs). Got to the ER, was given some pain medication and help breathing and was waiting for treatment when someone ran over 2 elderly people in front of the hospital. Their need was greater than mine so they took priority while I spent about 6 hours waiting.
Last week I had my first heart attack. In this case I was the one that was immediately helped, stabilized, transferred to another hospital where they installed 2 stents and then back to my local hospital ICU all within 2 hours. If it weren’t for our system I would not be here today.
Most stories about hours in ER waiting rooms simply don't take the severity of the issue into account and just generalize.
Not saying that there are not issues, but I am so tired of the blanket anecdotal complaints
Self-harm and suicide attempts account for some situations, I think following that you can imagine others. The article mentions that 70% include other mental health disorders, with a gambling addiction as a contributing factor for presentation.
I had the same question. I'm guessing that they tried to commit suicide or something but didn't think we could handle hearing that so they didn't mention it in the article.
The study addresses it. You don't walk into an ER and say "Doctor I have a gambling addiction.", rather you typically present as having a suicide attempt, intoxication or drug overdose, psychosis, or panic attack. During the assessment the treating team identifies the main contributing reason for one of the above listed conditions and there are two specific codes available if gambling is one of the primary contributors.
Adrenaline is the drug, ain't it ... And gambling is just one way to leverage it.
However once you realize that gambling is not the drug, and merely something that triggers your body to create a rush... Then can you really call it a drug? At least any more then any other of those activities?
Eg Skydiving and basically any other extreme sports.
And once you're there, you should really realize that it's not worth the sacrifice.
This is a societal issue and should not be addressed with legislation.
The only thing that can be safely regulated are things like disallowing marketing.
There is a fentanyl vaccine approaching human trials, but I don't believe its mechanism works close enough to the reward center. Maybe gene therapy is a long term fix as it relates to the reward center dysfunction, to be determined.
It should either be illegal or not. This idea that the state has a monopoly on getting money from doing a thing that you are saying is bad doesn't make sense.
If it is bad and yet the government is allowed to use it to make money then is the government evil? Why does the government get to do it if we can't? It just makes the whole thing seem ridiculous and makes underground betting seem like I guess it isn't really that bad since the government is allowed to do it. The operators are just people fighting for their freedom to operate the same business the government operates.
Harm reduction. In the US, state lotteries have reduced illegal gambling. Illegal gambling would increase under a total ban.
Some markets fail. If the government can step in and provide a service that doesn't end in a failed market, that's not an imposition on anyone's freedom.
Because any addictive thing is on a spectrum and you don't want the people with incentives to go all the way up the spectrum to be the operator of the harmful thing, a là the dose makes the poison. (See alcohol, cigarettes, any class of drugs etc.)
Some things are just wholly harmful where no small amount provides any benefits, some are harmful in large doses, but not so harmful in small doses that they cannot provide other uses.
Governments (ideally) don't exist to maximize profit so they are (generally) not incentivized to increase the addictions of their populace.
I think of it is the level of regulation I'd require / desire in an endeavour.
On one side there's things with very little regulation required, private companies go crazy (and they will!:).
On the other hand, there's things I want high regulation on - use of violence (army / pokice / security), medicine, key infra utilities, alcohol/drugs/gambling, etc.
We can discuss whether we agree those things need regulation, and if so, what form that regulation takes.
(To me, some things I want so highly regulated there's no benefit in private ownership, just risk of runaway loop exploitation)
Some things are better left in control of the government _because_ they are dangerous. You either:
* Outlaw gambling, and gamblers will just go towards shadier options, putting their own lives in even more risk.
* Allow private operators whose goal is to extract as much money from possible from gamblers as possible and ensure that you will inevitably have people abusing the system up to the limits to which it can go and testing out if they can go further, over and over again
* Government ran gambling organisations that can ensure they also offer proper systems to wean yourself off, offer healthcare, and make use of the money "made" from operating it to improve your health care systems.
Only one of those options is sensible.
The operators are just people fighting for their freedom to operate the same business the government operates.
HAHAHAHAHA. No. Absolutely not. Some people are truly as caricatural as movies and books make them appear, and casino owners truly live up to it. I worked for them, for "betting rooms", anything you want: they are thieves, mafias, manipulators and bring nothing but misery on the world. They're not "fighting for their freedom", they have found a legal way to abuse human misery and addictions.
It should either be illegal or not. This idea that the state has a monopoly on getting money from doing a thing that you are saying is bad doesn't make sense.
So no nation in history should have been allowed to have a military to defend its loot or to acquire more loot.
Vegas was such a great solution to gambling for Americans. We had it contained to a specific place, making it easy to access but also easy to avoid.
Cryptocurrency, which turned into just another form of gambling, seems to have been the corrupting influence that allowed it to spread into people's homes. I hope we can reverse it somehow.
Since this was recently legalized and nothing that we say on HN or in general will actually lead to changing it back (we were never asked to legalize it in the first place), I’m inclined to lean into this and say: good, fuck ‘em!
I’m confused, are these suicide attempts due to gambling addiction or is it mental health ER patients looking to enter a gambling addiction treatment program?
I’m having a hard time thinking of any other reason that a gambling addiction would cause someone to visit the ER.
Huh?
Ok, so I assume they mean that these emergency visits were for things like drug overdoses and psychotic episodes in people led to by their gambling disorders, not for the gambling disorders themselves. What a strange way of writing this up. A gambling disorder is a chronic problem, not an acute one.
There's a difference between "emergency visit for X" where you treat X and "emergency visit (for Y) because of X" where you treat Y proximal to X, and people could learn to be more discerning in their use and interpretation of language.
Yeah, that was kind of odd.
Maybe they also mean suicidality after ending up in a ton of debt? Or just other self-harm because of it?
Personally, I really don’t like the expansion of legalized gambling. I’m not surprised it’s causing serious issues.
I would at least be more OK if it happened but advertising was heavily restricted/banned in context. The fact that every professional sport seems to be nothing but a thin wrapper around gambling ads now can’t possibly be good for us as a society.
I wonder how many were for suicide attempts after a huge loss specifically.
from the study
Contributing reason, sure, but main reason makes no sense.
apparently there's an ICD code for it
i guess if someone gets a meltdown (mental breakdown) after losing a lot of money
That definitely still seems like contributing.
Also, the ICD ontology specifically exists for billing purposes and isn't the same as patient diagnostic classification, though there is overlap and people do mistakenly use it as such sometimes. But there's a difference between "emergency visit for X" (treat X) and "emergency visit because of X" (treat Y proximal to X). (I also edited my original comment to include this last part, since it seems likely to create confusion)
there's a difference in semantics between clinical reason and billing, agreed, though it seems that the news article did not sensationalize the study, and the study uses at least one valid code that can be a primary reason for a visit, and while I'm absolutely just a random dog on the internet, for me the overlap in meaning seems significant to warrant the use of this term.
https://icdlist.com/icd-10/F63.0
https://icdlist.com/icd-10/Z72.6 "The code is not accepted as a principal diagnosis "
Maybe. On the other hand it's common for genuine medical problems to 'make no sense' to a layperson. That tradition goes back thousands of years.
The paper lists the mental health conditions as "anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorders, self-harm, acute stress reaction and other". I'm surprised that multiple people went into the ER to seek treatment for a gambling addiction without being flagged for anything else. It seems like there should be a better place for people looking for help to go.
Privately funded health care solves this.
it'd be cool if you expanded on that thought for the rest of us
Our incredible brains are easily high-jacked. Another concerning trend in global/societal mental health that stresses different parts of it (e.g. increased ER visits). If the entirety of humanity is a connected mind let's say, and more and more parts of it are being damaged by companies that capitalize on "flaws" in the human brain -- which means our shared mentality keeps weakening and can be exploited more and more. It's just so much easier now because there is a machine in your pocket full of endless ways to high-jack your mind and attention.
We live in really crazy/fascinating times, accelerating human problems at "internet scale".
It is interesting how we actually ended up forming societies and cultures with how many little broken things occur in our minds. I guess as the saying goes "What doesn't kill you leaves you a hollow broken shell to pump out more copies of your DNA".
maybe its the other way around. my wife and I are pretty 'special', but when we step in to try to make up the different for each other we're a little more basically functional.
Organizing into communities and societies is absolutely what has allowed humanity to prosper beyond the sum of its parts. Our propensity for both idealism and shame, while being deeply intertwined with our vulnerability to highjacking, are also things that allow us to imagine something better and strive to achieve it. There's nothing that brings out shame better than the presence of other people, and nothing more inspiring than working well together with others towards a common goal.
There is also the direction of influencing those in charge of creating laws and orders and ways to prevent society from collapsing. Law makers who give in to lobbying -- I mean some of these prices points are quite low: $XX,XXX to get someone to vote "yes" for a thing that impacts millions of constituents and earns the lobbying orders of magnitude more than the payout. That is excellent ROI.
Yeah it is so absurd. The going cost of a politician in local California politics is on the order of $30-60k a year. Very inexpensive when they vote on policies shaping billions of dollars worth of sales.
Because these problems have never been dealt with. We scold victims and sell this "individual responsibility"/"bootstraps" bullshit to avoid doing so. Some of us create these products that actively fuck with people's ability to make decisions well, and then we yell at those people and tell them to act right.
The only difference now is the Internet both makes it frictionless and therefore so much easier to do, and the Internet also then let's us see into the lives being ruined in the process. But the problem remains exactly the same: if you, as a person, have no ethics and see no issue in causing misery at scale, you can make a LOT of fucking money in our society. And not only will you likely not be charged, now they'll probably call you an innovator and put you on a magazine.
And then we wonder why everything is getting worse all the time.
And before anyone tries the gotcha with me, no I do not work at any firm like this. No gambling, no social media, no recommendation algorithms. The company I work at comes by it honestly: we sell solutions to problems people actually have. And no we're not worth 66 trillion dollars but, we can all sleep at night. And that's not so bad.
Practically any entertainment product is going to have problem users(food products too, along with alcohol and other drugs).
There are people who play video games to excess or watch tv to excess and it is harmful to them, but that really needs to be balanced against the vast majority of users that exercise reasonable restraint. Its just not a fair justification to ban things that 99.9%+ of users are about to operate responsibly.
Truly astounding numbers. Without a doubt, online gambling is the most preventable public health crisis of our generation. None of this had any business getting legalized.
An average of $31807 per person...
It's a long tail. The vast majority make $20 parlay wagers here and there and they're the real cash cow. And then there are the degens that make $2,000, or $5,000 wagers on everything because otherwise "what's the point?".
Short of outright banning (which I would favor), we can at least make mobile wagers capped at say $100 and the same account can't wager more that $500 within a 24 hour period.
That would allow people to have their fun but seriously limit the blast radius when they inevitably lose big repeatedly.
You got the meaning of "whale" wrong. The majority of the winnings / losings come from the "long tail" addicts.
I think my edit more accurately reflects what is going on.
You need to put more time into the proposal if you want to make it serious. How long would it take for people to learn they need "alt accounts" to gamble?
Suggestions:
1. Ban advertising of gambling.
2. Ban "remote" gambling including phone apps.
What would it take to make progress on this in the current regulatory environment? Post a link to someone who has thought about it.
The gross amount doesn't tell you how much money is being lost to gambling. I'm not going to soften that wording, it really is lost, but such a shocking gross amount means the average loss is in the thousands per year. Gambling is also the archetypal whale hunt. Your best customers are harmed most by your product.
There's nothing else that delivers that level of harm directly to a device in your pocket.
It also could be inflated due to winnings being put back into another bet. A single dollar could be accounted for multiple times if used in multiple bets.
Not that I am saying that this number is ok, gambling is a net negative on any society.
Average is meaningless for anything that isn’t a normal distribution. The median spend per account is probably like $100.
"The average is meaningless so here is a number I pulled from my ass."
while the specific illustrative example they gave may be ass-pulled, the point the parent comment is making is valid.
I concur
Basically printing money just like tobacco companies used to be (and now are again with smokeless products). I'm not generally in favor of morality police laws, but this is so egregious it's beyond morality to me- it's vulnerable peoples' firmware getting exploited to give predatory actors their money.
That figure seemed way off to me (gut response) so I did a tiny bit of digging: Ontario claims income (primary household income) for 2024 was $791B. ~10% isn't as shocking as I expected.
Really? That's an incredible number to me. 10% of all household spending goes to gambling?! 31,000 dollars per player *per year*? The mind boggles.
By transaction volume yes. Presumably it’s not all spending though, if you regularly win back some of that money. The same dollar is probably wagered multiple times before it is lost.
Ontario lotteries pay out about 58 cents per dollar in, so that's still $13,000 annually out-of-pocket for a total spend of $31,000. That's crazy money.
Sportsbooks typically pay back more like 90%, brick and mortar casinos 90%-99% depending on the game. I don't know what Ontario mandates for regulated online casinos, but I'd guess they're at the high end of that and focus on volume, return custom and dark patterns rather than extreme house edge.
If it's 98%, the average household loses 0.2% of their income gambling.
Wagering 10% of your household income is not shocking?? What would it take to shock you? That is an astounding amount.
Most people are living paycheck to paycheck. I've watched gambling destroy more than one family member's lives.
To put this number in context: estimate 1/3 of income for rent, so this is 1/3 of their rent?! Translating that to my own rent is an amount that would immediately lead me to quit forever.
The key word is *as*. It's a lot, it's shocking, it's not *as* shocking as my I thought on first read.
It's both better and worse than it seems. I'm guessing something like 50% of folks gamble $0. Then another 45% gamble some amount of their income, averaging 10%. Finally 5% will gamble everything they have and send their family careening into poverty.
Wow, good thing I'm a curmudgeon who only wants to bet at an IRL sportsbook. A place I only get around to visiting every few years.
No good can come of me having a gambling app, I already fool around too much with stocks.
Important context that many of these dollars are counted multiple times.
Ex: you bet 100 and win, bringing your holdings to 200. You bet another 100 and lose, back to 100. You’ve gambled $200 but have arrived at the same number you started with.
I have friends who gamble in excess of 100k/yr total. In general their net is +/- 3k. $3,000 is a lot to spend on a hobby, but the overall number can be misleading
Good call out. I hadn't considered this. Would be interesting to see net.
I'm getting sick of the ads. It's in every NHL commercial break, Rogan (though I don't know about it now) has them as sponsors
Guys, it's predatory. Stop
Let me guess - because some people are unable to consume this form of entertainment responsibly, we have to make it illegal for everyone?
Makes sense. While we’re at it let’s kick the war on drugs back into high gear, reinstate prohibition, and make other higher risk behavior illegal.
We don’t have to fully outlaw gambling or other forms of high risk entertainment, but we absolutely should be outlawing the pervasive advertising these companies are doing. You can’t enjoy sports these days without dodging tons of ads for betting platforms
I don’t see why advertisement for gambling is any more offensive than advertisement for any other form of entertainment
Watching a TV show or a movie that you saw a commercial for isn't going to bankrupt you and cause you to lose your house.
Should we ban advertisement for skydiving and other such high risk behavior?
I haven't looked much into the Canadian levels, but I assume they are similar to the US. Some stats might not be quite right, but...
Something like .15% of the US population skydive a year. Almost none of them die.
I've seen estimates that over 5% of the US population gamble at a "problem" level and about 0.5% to 1% are outright addicted. About 20% of those addicted have a suicide attempt.
Americans who skydive in the US will be about the same number of Americans who attempt suicide due to gambling issues. Skydiving is quite safe so the death rate is so minimal.
The scale between the two is just so different.
Because there is a significant amount of externalized costs we should increase the impedance: taxes, banning/regulating advertising, cooling off periods, limits, et cetera.
We can go back to how it used to be, when you had to go to a gambling establishment in person
Why would we do that? I’m perfectly capable of using a gambling app responsibly.
Consider the possibility that your brain chemistry is different from that of other people, and that this could affect the level of responsibility people bring to bear here.
Because it's harm reduction. Sometimes you can reduce a vice impact by putting in friction. Too much can end with poor results for sure.
I'd settle for making these apps play fair at least. Being able to effectively ban users who are good at sports betting by limiting their wagers to trivial amounts[1] is a "heads we win, tails you lose" situation and contradicts their marketing claims.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/sports/opinion-sports-betting-morgan-camp...
Unfortunately I fail to empathise with gamblers not because I think they deserve to be afflicted by this disease but simply because I have never found gambling appealing as an activity.
I bought a few lottery tickets when the prize reaches astronomical proportions but it was always a case of going along and doing it with family/friends just for fun.
I guess I could understand the appeal if the chances to actually win something were pretty good but it’s a well known fact that the house always wins in the end.
that was a strange sentence to read! the whole point with empathy is being able to do it despite not sharing the same feelings or point of view. it's putting yourself in their shoes, and attempting to understand the things they would feel.
maybe you meant you can't "relate to" or "identify with" or something
There is a double digit percentage of Americans who are relying on winning the lottery for retirement.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-millennials-would-rather-...
I have never felt anything about gambling. Most boring thing ever. I don't feel anything about investment, and wrote automation to track mine because it's all so boring.
I wouldn't tempt fate to try to expose myself more, but it doesn't seem like I contain whatever is required to form these addictions.
Has it been studied if some people are just much more vulnerable than others, and are there predictive factors?
Yes. One interesting example is that compulsive gambling is a side effect of a certain class of drugs for treating Parkinson’s disease.
https://parkinsonsjournal.com/en/parkinsons-disease/gambling...
Another interesting thing is that GLP-1s anecdotally treat compulsive gambling.
I feel the same way - it's just not fun for me. I like playing poker with my friends, but I like the social aspect of it - putting down $20 on the table is no different than buying a few beers at a bar, and I don't care if I come out of the game with more or less money.
Going to a casino, which I've done a few times, is just wildly disinteresting.
But I know I'm prone to other sorts of addictions, so I guess gambling is somehow different.
I like alcohol and trying new things, whether that be food or languages. I get nothing from gambling. Not all stimuli affect everyone equally. You’d need something approaching a unified theory of consciousness to adequately explain this finely.
A few months ago I read an article that compared vibe coding to gambling[0] and I've found it a useful model.
[0]: maybe this one: https://www.fast.ai/posts/2026-01-28-dark-flow/
Out of seemingly nowhere a few years ago, the canadian local landscape changed overnight.
I feel like I am walking around las vegas half the time.
Virtually every corner store has turned into those english sports betting pubs or whatever they have all over England.
It's disgusting.
... a betting shop, you mean?
Are Canadian ERs different than ERs in the U.S.? Why would one go to an emergency room, seek emergency treatment, for a gambling disorder?
is the sense that it wont immediately bankrupt you, yes, they are different.
but my skimming of the study itself is that something else occurs (mental episode of some sort, such as anxiety attacks or suicide attempts, etc.) and gambling is noted as a primary or contributing factor in the billing code. it does not appear like someone wakes up, realizes they have an addiction to gambling, and then walks into the ER.
also in the sense that you'll wait for a looong time to get treatment
the reason i brought up cost is because gambling addicts having a mental crisis are not typically sitting on piles of cash. a canadian gambling addict would be more willing to visit the ER than a us one because of the cost of the visit.
the pay vs. wait argument is a fun one, but im not super interested in hashing it out here
Maybe, maybe not. Our system is based on triage so if you are in dire need you go first.
A few years ago I thought I broke some ribs in a snowboarding accident (turns out it was just 3 cracked ribs). Got to the ER, was given some pain medication and help breathing and was waiting for treatment when someone ran over 2 elderly people in front of the hospital. Their need was greater than mine so they took priority while I spent about 6 hours waiting.
Last week I had my first heart attack. In this case I was the one that was immediately helped, stabilized, transferred to another hospital where they installed 2 stents and then back to my local hospital ICU all within 2 hours. If it weren’t for our system I would not be here today.
Most stories about hours in ER waiting rooms simply don't take the severity of the issue into account and just generalize.
Not saying that there are not issues, but I am so tired of the blanket anecdotal complaints
You also wait a looooong time to get treatment at an ER in the US too, unless you're actively dying, and sometimes even if you are.
never been my experience
Self-harm and suicide attempts account for some situations, I think following that you can imagine others. The article mentions that 70% include other mental health disorders, with a gambling addiction as a contributing factor for presentation.
If you’re in the midst of some kind of crisis, whether physical or mental, it’s somewhere safe you can go that’s available 24/7.
From there they can keep you safe until you’re stabilized (physically or mentally) and then refer you to specialists or hospitalize you.
I had the same question. I'm guessing that they tried to commit suicide or something but didn't think we could handle hearing that so they didn't mention it in the article.
How does someone at the ER for gambling addiction present?
The study addresses it. You don't walk into an ER and say "Doctor I have a gambling addiction.", rather you typically present as having a suicide attempt, intoxication or drug overdose, psychosis, or panic attack. During the assessment the treating team identifies the main contributing reason for one of the above listed conditions and there are two specific codes available if gambling is one of the primary contributors.
All gambling should be state owned. It is a strict societal loss anyway, we can at least soften the overall blow.
Losses can be redistributed and cover for the externalities of gambling. And we will be able to control the knob on how addictive we make them.
For profit companies have the target to maximize their profit, so of course they will ramp up any method that can bring in more revenue.
Pretty much agree. But even then, the state should not be incentivizing its use (looking you, CA lottery and friends).
Gambling is a drug, and should be recognized as such.
Adrenaline is the drug, ain't it ... And gambling is just one way to leverage it.
However once you realize that gambling is not the drug, and merely something that triggers your body to create a rush... Then can you really call it a drug? At least any more then any other of those activities?
Eg Skydiving and basically any other extreme sports.
And once you're there, you should really realize that it's not worth the sacrifice.
This is a societal issue and should not be addressed with legislation.
The only thing that can be safely regulated are things like disallowing marketing.
Dopamine, and many drugs trigger it in the same way as gambling.
We should try GLP-1s. It patches the brain's reward center.
GLP-1 drugs may fight addiction across every major substance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47280797 - March 2026
GLP-1 medications get at the heart of addiction: study - https://medicine.washu.edu/news/glp-1-medications-get-at-the... - March 4th, 2026
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45907422 (citations)
There is a fentanyl vaccine approaching human trials, but I don't believe its mechanism works close enough to the reward center. Maybe gene therapy is a long term fix as it relates to the reward center dysfunction, to be determined.
HN Search: fentanyl vaccine - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Resetting the Brain’s Reward Pathway: Gene Therapy’s Breakthrough in Alcohol Addiction - https://scitechdaily.com/resetting-the-brains-reward-pathway... - August 20th, 2023
Why wouldn't it be addressed with legislation? What is legislation for if not to solve societal issues?
Also, gambling is empirically much more addictive and leads to worse outcomes than extreme sports - hence why many feel it needs to be limited.
It should either be illegal or not. This idea that the state has a monopoly on getting money from doing a thing that you are saying is bad doesn't make sense.
If it is bad and yet the government is allowed to use it to make money then is the government evil? Why does the government get to do it if we can't? It just makes the whole thing seem ridiculous and makes underground betting seem like I guess it isn't really that bad since the government is allowed to do it. The operators are just people fighting for their freedom to operate the same business the government operates.
Harm reduction. In the US, state lotteries have reduced illegal gambling. Illegal gambling would increase under a total ban.
Some markets fail. If the government can step in and provide a service that doesn't end in a failed market, that's not an imposition on anyone's freedom.
Because any addictive thing is on a spectrum and you don't want the people with incentives to go all the way up the spectrum to be the operator of the harmful thing, a là the dose makes the poison. (See alcohol, cigarettes, any class of drugs etc.)
Some things are just wholly harmful where no small amount provides any benefits, some are harmful in large doses, but not so harmful in small doses that they cannot provide other uses.
Governments (ideally) don't exist to maximize profit so they are (generally) not incentivized to increase the addictions of their populace.
Which is to say, total prohibition doesn't work, so they need to provide a some release, just not a total free for all.
It reminds me of state-run liquor stores in some US states.
I think of it is the level of regulation I'd require / desire in an endeavour.
On one side there's things with very little regulation required, private companies go crazy (and they will!:).
On the other hand, there's things I want high regulation on - use of violence (army / pokice / security), medicine, key infra utilities, alcohol/drugs/gambling, etc.
We can discuss whether we agree those things need regulation, and if so, what form that regulation takes.
(To me, some things I want so highly regulated there's no benefit in private ownership, just risk of runaway loop exploitation)
Some things are better left in control of the government _because_ they are dangerous. You either:
* Outlaw gambling, and gamblers will just go towards shadier options, putting their own lives in even more risk.
* Allow private operators whose goal is to extract as much money from possible from gamblers as possible and ensure that you will inevitably have people abusing the system up to the limits to which it can go and testing out if they can go further, over and over again
* Government ran gambling organisations that can ensure they also offer proper systems to wean yourself off, offer healthcare, and make use of the money "made" from operating it to improve your health care systems.
Only one of those options is sensible.
HAHAHAHAHA. No. Absolutely not. Some people are truly as caricatural as movies and books make them appear, and casino owners truly live up to it. I worked for them, for "betting rooms", anything you want: they are thieves, mafias, manipulators and bring nothing but misery on the world. They're not "fighting for their freedom", they have found a legal way to abuse human misery and addictions.
So no nation in history should have been allowed to have a military to defend its loot or to acquire more loot.
State owned, no advertising, and your last year's tax return to prove income.
As they are now, even state level gambling is used as a tax on the poor, because they're the people desperate enough to do it.
Vegas was such a great solution to gambling for Americans. We had it contained to a specific place, making it easy to access but also easy to avoid.
Cryptocurrency, which turned into just another form of gambling, seems to have been the corrupting influence that allowed it to spread into people's homes. I hope we can reverse it somehow.
Since this was recently legalized and nothing that we say on HN or in general will actually lead to changing it back (we were never asked to legalize it in the first place), I’m inclined to lean into this and say: good, fuck ‘em!
Why did it result in an emergency room visit? Did they try to self-harm or something because of losses?
Yes, gambling prevalence is direct related to suicide.
I’m confused, are these suicide attempts due to gambling addiction or is it mental health ER patients looking to enter a gambling addiction treatment program?
I’m having a hard time thinking of any other reason that a gambling addiction would cause someone to visit the ER.