When Someone Hides a Gambling Problem

The story

Michelle's father died not long after her wedding. What she found afterward was a life she hadn't known about: letters from bailiffs, debts that went back years, and bank records showing a pattern of gambling that had been running quietly underneath everything.

He had told the family he was in Portugal, running a vineyard. He had actually been living in a tent in a friend's garden for something close to four or five years. His health had deteriorated badly before he died.

"Ultimately, he died not telling anyone," she told the Big Issue. "I think if he had felt less judged about it, less shame about it, he would have been able to come forward and seek support."

She's now fundraising for Ygam, a charity that does gambling-harm education.

It would be easy to read that as an extreme case. It isn't. It's the ordinary case, carried further than most.

Concealment is the default, not the exception

The number worth sitting with is 3.4%.

That's the share of people who gambled in the past twelve months and sought any support at all because of it, from the Gambling Commission's own 2025 annual report. Not "sought treatment." Not "entered a program." Sought support, in any form, including advice.

Put the other way: more than 96 out of every 100 people who gambled last year handled whatever it did to them without telling anyone whose job it was to help.

That's not a treatment-capacity problem. You can't have a waiting-list problem with people who never get on the list. It's a disclosure problem, and disclosure is upstream of everything else we build.

There's a second number that explains part of why. Among people who said someone close to them gambled, 10.0% reported feeling embarrassment, guilt or shame because of it, at least occasionally. The shame isn't confined to the person placing the bets. It spreads to the people around them, which means the family is often quietly managing their own version of the secret at the same time.

Two people in the same house, each protecting the other from a thing they both half-know. That's how five years in a tent becomes survivable as a story about a vineyard.

The homelessness link is real, and the number you'll see quoted is wrong

Here's where the reporting needs a correction, and it matters.

You'll frequently read that homeless people are "ten times more likely" to be problem gamblers. That figure traces to a 2014 University of Cambridge study that interviewed around 450 people in homeless hostels and shelters in Westminster, one of the largest surveys of its kind ever done in the UK. It found problem gambling at 11.6% in that population.

The "ten times" came from comparing 11.6% against the national rate at the time, which was 0.7%.

That national baseline no longer exists. The Gambling Survey for Great Britain replaced the old methodology, and the Commission now measures 2.4% of adults at PGSI 8 or above, roughly 1.3 million people. The Commission explicitly warns against comparing GSGB figures to the surveys that came before, because the change in method accounts for much of the change in the number.

So the multiplier isn't ten. Against the current baseline it's closer to five. And honestly, nobody should be doing that arithmetic at all, because it's dividing a 2014 measurement in one London borough by a 2025 national measurement taken a completely different way.

What survives is the finding itself: 11.6% of the homeless people surveyed met the threshold for problem gambling, and gambling harm and housing loss travel together far more often than either sector accounts for.

The durable point isn't the ratio. It's that a man could lose his housing to gambling and spend half a decade in a tent, and not appear in any dataset as either.

What the numbers can't see

Michelle's father would not have shown up in the 3.4%, because he never sought support. He would not have shown up in homelessness statistics in any way that connected to gambling, because rough sleeping in a friend's garden isn't usually counted, and because nobody asks why.

He wouldn't have appeared in treatment data, debt-advice data, or the Gambling Commission's survey, because he wasn't reachable by any of them.

This is the part that should bother anyone building in this space. We measure the people who raise their hands. The entire architecture of gambling-harm support, the helplines, the self-exclusion schemes, the treatment referrals, activates on disclosure. It's built for the 3.4%.

The people it's least able to reach are the ones doing what he did, which is the most common thing there is: saying nothing, for years, and getting worse quietly.

If you think someone is hiding it

There's no clean detection method, and anyone selling you one is guessing. But a few things are worth knowing.

Look for the money, not the mood. Gambling harm is unusually invisible emotionally and unusually visible financially. Sudden secrecy about post, unexplained borrowing, small loans from several different people, accounts nobody's allowed to see. Michelle found bailiff letters. Those had been arriving for years.

Stories that explain an absence are worth gentle attention. Not because people who travel are lying, but because a long-running account of where someone is, offered rather than asked for, sometimes exists to prevent the question.

Lead with the judgement you're not making. The thing that kept him silent, by his daughter's reading, was expecting to be judged. If you open with the debt, you confirm the fear. Opening with the fact that you'd rather know than be protected gives them somewhere to put it down.

Don't require a confession to offer help. You can say the door is open without demanding they walk through it in that conversation. Most people need several approaches before one lands, and an approach that ends in a denial hasn't failed. It's told them where to come back to.

Get your own support, separately. That 10% figure is about you. If someone close to you is gambling, the shame lands on you too, and you're allowed to get help for that whether or not they ever do.

Where to go

In the UK, the National Gambling Helpline is free and open 24 hours on 0808 8020 133, run by GamCare. Ygam, the charity Michelle is fundraising for, works on gambling-harm education and has resources for families.

In the US, our urgent help page lists the national helpline, crisis lines, and same-day options by state.

If you're the one hiding it: the 3.4% figure means the odds are that you haven't told anyone, and that this is normal rather than damning. The gap between the secret and the first conversation is the widest part of this. It gets narrower immediately afterward, and it does not get narrower on its own.

Sources

• 'My dad died hiding a gambling addiction and homelessness. I wish he had let us help him'. Sienna Mahoney, Big Issue, 10 September 2026
• Gambling Survey for Great Britain, Annual Report 2025: Consequences from gambling. Gambling Commission official statistics. 3.4% support-seeking, 10.0% affected-other shame, 2.4% PGSI 8+
• Guidance on using statistics from the Gambling Survey for Great Britain. The Commission's own caution against comparing GSGB figures with earlier surveys
• New study reveals scale of problem gambling among homeless population. University of Cambridge, 2014. Sharman et al., Journal of Gambling Studies, n≈450, Westminster hostels and shelters
• GamCare / National Gambling Helpline. 0808 8020 133, free, 24 hours
• Ygam. Gambling-harm education charity