The Silent Surge of Gambling Addiction

Many of us have a visual of gambling addiction that conforms to a certain stereotype: expressionless senior citizens pulling levers on slot machines over and over amid puffs of smoke; screaming, argumentative men tearing up betting slips at a race track; cigar-chomping celebs getting in too deep at the blackjack table. But recent research suggests that a new type of problem gambler is growing all too common: a young sports fan staring at their smartphone.

To say that there has been a major cultural shift in how Americans view gambling is an extreme understatement, and legislation to legalize it has both caused and reflected this change. In 2017, only one state had a sportsbook—a place where it is legal to place wagers on the outcome of sporting events. At the time of this writing, that number has skyrocketed to 39. Over the course of seven years, placing a legal bet on a game went from being illegal almost everywhere to just the opposite.

But the even bigger story is that the vast majority of those bets are being placed online (as high as 94 percent by 2023). Mobile betting platforms spread like wildfire over just a few years' time, which also corresponded to a period of increasing time spent online during the pandemic. As more people turned toward their phones in the hopes of stimulation, connection, and stress relief, sports betting beckoned, with increasingly sophisticated and individually targeted ad campaigns. It didn't seem to take long for gambling itself to be advertised on television with celebrity spokespeople during the highest-profile games in all the major sports. For those who remember the days when gambling carried a significant moral stigma, it can be downright startling to see. But it's a different world now. In fact, a new generation of sports fans is growing up seeing gambling as part and parcel of their sports-watching experience.

So, with exponentially more people having access to sports betting, with the barriers to entry of placing bets being as low as they've ever been, and with popular opinion growing more accepting, it follows that problematic gambling—to the point of addiction—would grow as well. And now, there is concerning data that suggests that this is indeed the case. Clinical surveys have determined that a higher percentage (twice as high!) of online sports bettors experience problematic gambling behaviors than other types of bettors. And online sports gamblers are typically younger—which, much like with substance abuse, suggests that as their habits harden earlier in their development, they may find them much more difficult to shake as they can't remember a time without their addictive behavior being part of their life.

Finally, recent data reveals that when sports betting becomes available in a certain area, searches related to gambling addiction and hotlines for help increase significantly. Of course, one could argue that not everyone searching for help actually has a problem, and that awareness about the potential for problems is a positive thing—better to be inquiring about help than not, of course. But that is likely overly optimistic. Perhaps many of the searchers are concerned loved ones—and the truth is that gambling addiction is often a silent and stigmatized pathology. And with an increase in young people being enticed to spend just $5 to create an account on their phones with just a couple of clicks, to bet on absolutely any game—and ones that they would have been watching anyway—we can assume that far too many people with the propensity for addiction who would have had a hard time finding a betting venue 10 years ago, and thus may have never begun their addiction, will now cross that first threshold in a split second.

And the risk of that should no longer be silent.

In my next post, we'll talk about the specific warning signs of gambling addiction—and the dire need to have real conversations with more adolescents, especially young male sports fans, about the dangers that this new world creates.