Diana Gabriele, certified problem gambling counselor at the Residential Centre for Problem Gambling and Digital Dependency at Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare in Windsor, Ont., stands inside the common area of the centre on June 6. Today’s clients, Ms. Gabriele says, tend to be hooked on online casinos and sports betting.
“It’s a nightmare,” Ms. Gabriele said, singling out online sports betting as a particular challenge because of the tsunami of advertisements that portray it as a natural part of fan culture. Clients’ underlying problems are often similar, regardless of their preferred game of chance, Ms. Gabriele said. Betting can offer a dopamine-fuelled“It was always emotional,” Lesley, 41, said of her addiction to online slot machines. “I never really wanted to go and play slots if I was in a happy mood. Then it became emotional every day because I had this cloud over me over losing this money.”
At one point, she won a $100,000 jackpot from a slots website that, as far as she could tell, only allowed her to withdraw $10,000 of her winnings a week. After collecting the first instalment, she gambled most of the rest away on the same site. She played more, hoping to recoup her losses, but fell deeper into debt.
Lesley has abstained from gambling since joining the program. The most recent one-year follow-up data found that 75 per cent of participants achieved the same success, Ms. Gabriele said.The outpatient program at Hôtel-Dieu Grace treated 119 patients in 2023-24, 87 of them male and four of them 17 or younger. That total is up from 93, 70, 37 and 85 in the four previous years.