Early Detection of Risk for Gambling and Gaming Disorders

Some signs of a gambling disorder are easy to spot: the lost income, for starters, which is estimated at $1,100 per family per year in states where online gambling is legal. The deaths of despair, with 20% of problem gamblers attempting suicide. You can see it in the rate of divorce, bankruptcies, and auto repossessions. Some signs of gambling disorders are hard to miss.
Indications a person might have a gambling problem were explored in an article in GMA Lifestyle featuring an interview with Teresita C. Castillo, a gambling addiction counselor and addiction recovery specialist. Castillo is a board member of the International Society of Substance Use Professionals. Besides the losses of money, Castillo looks for isolating behavior:
You have the tendency to isolate […] especially if it’s really just the use of your phone or your tablet, you just use them in the comforts of your bedroom or even in the bathroom so nobody can see.
Other signs of trouble include stress, irritability, or anger, especially when interrupted or prohibited from using devices. Castillo was involved in the launch of a campaign in the Philippines to encourage “responsible gambling and gaming,” that is funded by DigiPlus, BingoPlus, and the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation, which all benefit from legalized gambling and gaming.
As if the insincerity of the effort were not obvious enough, the article announcing the launch of this campaign concludes with an advertisement to “check out these relaxing puzzle games” with a link to an online gaming website.
Figure 1: Screen capture from the announcement of a “responsible gambling and gaming” campaign ends with an advertisement for a gaming website. Screen capture dated January 29, 2025.
Addiction specialist Jody Bechtold, LCSW, and CEO of The Better Institute, encourages parents to “have the talk” with their kids about avoiding gambling. It starts early with “loot boxes” in video games that can be converted into real-world goods, rewarding compulsive playing and high-stakes wagers.
In a video on YouTube, Bechtold encourages parents not to give lottery tickets or scratch-off games to children as gifts. She would like to see churches and charities stop hosting gambling-related fundraisers. She laments “March Madness,” the annual orgy of betting pools on basketball that has normalized workplace gambling.
Fortunately, we can go back a step, before gambling becomes a problem, and see if there are signs something is brewing thanks to the efforts of the Early Risk Prediction on the Internet (eRisk) Workshop, part of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF). In 2021, CLEF published their findings concerning “Early Risk Detection of Pathological Gambling, Self-Harm and Depression Using BERT.”
Five annual workshops have looked at:
- Early Detection of Signs of Pathological Gambling
- Early Detection of Signs of Self-Harm
- Measuring the Severity of the Signs of Depression
The researchers scrub postings on Reddit regarding mental health and use them to train a model (BERT) to identify tendencies toward becoming a problem gambler. Here is a description of their process:
[Using] the posts from the r/GamblingAddiction and r/problemgambling subreddits as positive training data for pathological gambling detection. Posts in these subreddits are mostly discussing gambling addiction. We assume that most of the regular users in this subreddit are pathological gamblers.
I wish I could now tell you what BERT found about the early detection of pathological gambling, but there appear to be no conclusions presented, only the methodology of collection. A review of the eRisk program in Nature also explains the program and withholds the results. The article concludes, “Deep learning approaches with appropriate natural language processing methods can be used to detect users’ potential mental illnesses by their posts.” How?
For now, the answer appears to be that we know how to detect a higher risk for developing a gambling problem by analyzing social media posts, but we’re not going to share it. We will keep looking for answers here at AddictionNews.
Written by Steve O’Keefe. First published February 4, 2025.
Sources:
“Signs that you are developing a gambling addiction,” GMA Lifestyle, January 27, 2025.
“Luck, Skill, and The Rise of Gambling | Jody Bechtold,” TEDx Talks, May 7, 2019.
“Early Risk Detection of Pathological Gambling, Self-Harm and Depression Using BERT,” Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF), September 2021.
“A deep learning model for detecting mental illness from user content on social media,” Scientific Reports, July 2020.
Image Copyright: hannatw.