Practicing until 1:30 in the afternoon, followed by gambling until 7 a.m. became B.C. Lions’ center Angus Reid’s life, but it wasn’t sustainable.
“I wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t do anything,” Reid told CBC News.
Reid lost his wife, money, and was deep in debt in 2007, and he says he didn’t see any way out, except to keep gambling.
“You don’t know how to get out at all. You don’t want to deal with reality. You don’t want to look at the numbers. You don’t want to be honest with your friends and family,” Reid told CBC.
He said he finally came to grips with his gambling addiction by telling his parents, who supported his efforts to get help, and by signing up for the BCLC voluntary self-exclusion program, which requires casinos to ban him from gambling.
A desire to maintain his status as a professional football player and reputation among his peers also helped prod him toward seeking help, Reid said.
Now, eight years of avoiding casinos enabled him to rebuild his life and career, both of which were heading nowhere fast in 2007, and Raid said the support of others enabled him to overcome the addiction.
“If you were able to deal with it on your own, you would have already dealt with it, and you can’t,” he told the CBC.
Fortunately, even while gambling in a casino, Reid said help is only a few steps away. Virtually all casinos will help problem gamblers obtain help from government and other programs, and no longer enable gambling addictions by refusing entry to admitted problem gamblers.
Gambling addiction affects people in much the same way as any other addiction in that there is a physical dependency, as well as a mental one, said Dr. Evan Wood, who is the director of addiction services at Vancouver Coastal Health and Providence Health Care.
Wood said gambling addiction has virtually the same effect on as drug or alcohol addiction, but rather than seeking criminal solutions, he advocates a “public health approach.”
Such an approach utilizes gaming revenues to fund gambling addiction and self-help programs to combat problem gambling and stop as many people as possible from wrecking their lives via gambling addiction.
The alternative, Wood says, is to prohibit gambling altogether, but if that were done, there would be no way to regulate gambling and actually use it to help people overcome problem gambling.
