‘I felt like I needed to be taken away’: The hidden scale of gambling addiction among women – The Athletic

Stacey Goodwin sank beneath the bathwater and waited for death.

Amid the blankness, her memories unspooled to her first shift at the bookmakers, aged 18, and the cautionary tale that presented itself as early as day one the man who, having already lost his wife and children, would wait outside the shop until opening time and feed the slot machines all day. He was the gambling addict of popular imagination: unkempt, middle-aged, unemployed. He was not a woman in her early twenties with a career, a boyfriend and a family. It could never be her and yet

Seven years of deceit, of being unable to feed herself, of blowing her wages within an hour of being paid. Of fending off the voice her conjoined twin screaming at her, at all hours, to throw more money into the void.

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'I felt like I needed to be taken away': The hidden scale of gambling addiction among women - The Athletic