How Australia is leading the world in gambling addiction - my luncheon with Gamblers Anonymous

In my highly exciting life that mainly revolves around people and cats, I sometimes get to do something a bit different - last week, that was lunch with the people from Gamblers Anonymous, or GA for short.

This lunch was put on for professionals, to give them an overview of what GA is all about. I am sharing this here because some of the facts about gambling in Australia simply horrified me.

Australia has 0.2% of the world population but 20% (twenty percent!!!!!) of the world's poker machines. They multiplied when the state governments discovered they were a great way to fill their coffers, as Rev. Tim Costello so eloquently put to us at the lunch; so we now have a state-sanctioned and state-taxed addiction.

The amount of money that people in Australia lose to gambling is simply staggering (on some poker machines you can "feed in" - read lose - $56,000 in less than 6 hours). For those of you who cannot see the lure of "the pokies", imagine machines devised with music pictures and all the modern interactive bells and whistles to get you addicted (and yes, psychologists have worked for the manufacturers of poker-machines, to help make them even more addictive). Of course gambling can take many shapes, betting on sports (this is how young blokes first get hooked), the horses, casinos, cards, online gaming - you name it, and someone else than the punter is raking in the money and the state governments take a percentage of it.

How does it start? Well, we had a lovely young lady, who of course shall remain anonymous, share her story with us: some incredible abuse and hardship in her childhood, leaving her isolated and in constant, intense emotional pain. When she sat in front of a poker machine for the first time, with the music and the pull of maybe winning enough to change her life, the loud voices constantly battling it out in her brain became quiet for once.

I won't take you to the whole cycle of addiction, suffice to say this academic overachiever ended up facing fraud charges in court, as she started stealing from her employer to finance her addiction. The weirdest part was that she didn't realise that is was an addiction, until the cop who interrogated asked her, surprisingly gently, whether she might have a gambling problem.

He pointed her towards GA, there was a meeting going on around the corner that same day, and this is where her story really starts, because what she found at that first meeting of GA, was a whole community, welcoming her like no-one had ever done before. She found support, practical help, but most of all, she found friends. When before she relied on gambling to deaden her unbearable emotions, suddenly she experienced human kindness.

I have previously written about how research seems to be showing that human connection might be the antidote to addiction. Her story was exactly about that.

We heard some more stories that day, all showing another facet of the addiction, and more facets of what GA stands for. The fact that GA isn't accepting donations or subsidies (from anyone) tells you a lot about their integrity - they will do what is best for their members, being beholden to no-one else.

Whenever I read about the latest (bad) news, I sometimes feel hopeless.
That lunch with the people from GA has given me back my faith in humanity - we may be capable of the worst, but we also are capable of the best.