New Gambling Commission research suggests UK gamblers have a lack of trust in support tools offered by gambling operators. This is considered a barrier to some people gaining the help they need.
This comes from the National Centre for Social Research who were commissioned to conduct qualitative research with a subset of participants who had indicated they had experienced severe or potentially adverse consequences from their own gambling in the last 12 months.
When looking at preventing and reducing the consequences of gambling, there was a mixed level of awareness of gambling support tools and services.
For those who had accessed support through gambling operator websites, they described largely positive experiences using self-help tools. These included setting deposit and time limits and using the self-exclusion tools on gambling apps and websites.
Later on in the study, however, a barrier to gaining support was a lack of trust in the support tools, specifically those offered by the gambling operators.
“Participants expressed scepticism about how trustworthy and effective tools offered by the gambling industry would be in supporting people, due to the feeling that they are implemented only ‘as a PR exercise’ or the perception of the industry benefitting from people gambling therefore not being really interested in helping them stop,” the research paper states.
‘’Well, we’ve got these tools and they’re there to help you.’ But I think indirectly they probably know that the actual participant will carry on doing it or even put some more into – put some more funds into the gambling. So, I don’t trust a lot of these so-called tools,” said a male participant who was involved in the study.
Moving away from the operators, a common view from participants was that their experiences with negative consequences from gambling were not severe enough to qualify needing support.
“Others felt that to seek out support was to admit a failure in allowing their gambling to negatively impact their lives. Related to this was the issue of stigma.”
The participants highlighted feelings of embarrassment and shame due to gambling, with these emotions acting as another barrier to accessing the support they may need.
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