reasons for suicide can be complex, we do know that gambling can be a dominant factor without which the suicide may not have occurred,’ said the government’ s 2023 Suicide prevention in England strategy. Finding‘ increasing evidence’ of the relationship between harmful gambling and suicide, including in younger people, it stated that‘ action therefore needs to be taken to address the harms of gambling, including suicide, and reach people at risk’.

The link has been backed up most recently by analysis of the ongoing Avon longitudinal study of parents and children – also known as the Children of the 90s project – which has followed the health and development of 14,000 pregnant women and their families since 1991. Researchers at the University of Bristol studied data from more than 2,800 people in the study, and found that problem gambling was

‘ clearly linked to a marked and long-lasting increase in suicide attempts among young people in the UK’( DDN, October, page 5). This future suicidality risk was most stark among 20-year-olds, they discovered, with a 20 per cent increase in suicide attempts for every increment on the Problem Gambling Severity Index( PGSI) – those scoring eight or above on the PGSI had quadruple the rate of suicide attempts after four years.

So were the researchers surprised by the extent of this?‘ This increase was definitely stark – these statistics represent very real people who have attempted suicide, which is awful to consider,’ lead author Oliver Bastiani tells DDN.‘ We’ re the first to find that this association between gambling and suicidality stretches to four years post-gambling, which I think really emphasises the sheer impact that gambling can have on suicidality. Unfortunately, the general link wasn’ t overly

surprising, as our findings add to a growing body of research. I hope the starkness of this evidence contributes to a shift in the status quo, where we recognise gambling as the harmful activity it is – similar to discovering the link between smoking and cancer.’

LONG-TERM IMPACT As the people in the study were tracked from birth it not only meant that the research team could properly analyse the long-term impacts of problem gambling, it also enabled them to rule out alternative explanations that had‘ hindered’ previous studies –‘ such as that people might be drawn to problem gambling as a way of escaping pre-existing suicidal feelings’, the report says.

While there was already growing evidence of the link between gambling and suicide, it could be‘ unclear whether people were already suicidal before they started gambling,

or whether gambling itself led to suicidality’, Bastiani explains. The one previous longitudinal study in the UK had looked at young adults aged 16-24, and found that increases in problem gambling were associated with suicide attempts a year later.‘ Clearly, this suggested the potential for gambling being a risk factor for suicide attempts, but we needed more evidence,’ he says.‘ So in our study we were able to rule out this alternative explanation by accounting for people who had attempted suicide by 16 years old, which would predate any legal gambling activity. When we accounted for this, we still found evidence for a link between later gambling and suicidality – which suggests that it’ s unlikely that these people were gambling because they were suicidal. Instead, it’ s more likely that it’ s gambling driving this association – that gambling itself is contributing to this later suicidality.’

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