“It matters more when there’s money on it,” the bookmaker Sky Bet’s marketing slogan used to say. It certainly mattered to our family, when my husband Luke took his life after struggling with a devastating gambling addiction.
He’d started out betting on football every weekend with his friends, doing exactly what the ads portrayed as harmless fun. Yet it’s anything but harmless. More than a million people are addicted to gambling in the UK, and every single day at least one of them takes their life. Behind every person who dies or has their life destroyed is a network of family and friends destroyed along with them.
