Background

Gambling Watch Scotland is a website that tries to challenge the stigma of gambling addiction by raising awareness. It’s a developing site, partly a ‘library’ to be browsed. At is heart is a film in which Martin (a Director at The Machine Zone), delivers a compelling account of his lived experiences from despair to recovery, or as he prefers to term it, discovery.

The website is made possible by an award from Greater Glasgow and Clyde NHS Healthy Minds Anti-Stigma initiatives. This funding includes contributing to the completion of our film, One Last Spin which will be screened initially at community events in Greater Glasgow and Clyde, then throughout Scotland and beyond. Fund raising is ongoing for distribution and towards a professionally designed website for the film in the latter part of 2022. This will allow the film to be seen throughout the world.

Our films and websites are parts of The Machine Zone’s aims to promote awareness of gambling harms, challenge stigma, signpost support, network with organisations, campaign with many others for improved regulatory measures to reduce harms, campaign for greatly improved treatment availability, and focus on the state of gambling education and its development.

This work is done by three individual volunteers, two of whom work at it full time without any pay. Capacity is therefore very limited. We see our work as a very small contribution to the field. Some amazing small third sector organisations have grown in the past decade and we celebrate them and do our best to promote them. We’re happy to work with statutory projects such as from the NHS and Public Health. We distance ourselves totally from gambling industry funded ‘harm reduction’ organisations. These receive huge (to us) funding from industry, and promote the preferred industry narrative of ‘problem gamblers’, isolated atoms of pathological individuals, ‘personal responsibility’. This narrative erodes the urgent attention to industry products ‘designed for addiction’, profits over people, slick marketing and advertising, the distasteful association between sport, especially football, and gambling, and which ignores.the wider social and cultural determinants that bring misery to individuals from communities suffering the most extreme effects of inequality, exploitation and injustice.

Beneath policies, strategies and implementation are core values. Among ours, as our refusal to work with the gambling industry suggests, are moral and political values. This may raise eyebrows but describes who we are: we believe health  involves political and moral issues. That does not mean we ignore individual agency and the potential each of us has not only to help our own wellbeing to flourish but also to engage with reciprocal interactions with others and do that essential little bit so vital to improving wellbeing ‘on the ground’, involving the best of human communion.

Gambling Watch Scotland: Evaluation

Given our lack of capacity across the board, our amateur status and low skills base, not surprisingly we are strongly aware of the weaknesses of the website and its minimal ‘influence’. We have no ongoing human support, ongoing training, expert design staff, specialist communications teams, marketing departments etc. We are incredibly grateful to those organisations which have greater capacity whose individual members of staff have provided not only practical support including funding, training events, networking and promotion but also, as importantly, recognition and encouragement. We have been most fortunate to meet some outstanding individual staff who are so obviously driven by deep commitment to values driven by a vocation towards minimising gross health inequalities.  We fully recognise that such folk themselves are located in institutional hierarchies in which their work is sometimes devalued, and in which inevitable structural factors can be at best frustrating and at worst sources of ill health.

This is complemented by our growing engagement with many of the hundreds of ‘little’ community organisations working so very hard. Against a background of some big organisations whose main aim seems to be marked by continual self-congratulation, pride and boasting, all heavily promoted through slick media channels, the very opposite characteristics are seen in the vital on-the-ground community initiatives marked by humility, honesty and human-centred support: in any case, these organisations haven’t either the capacity and time to advertise their self-proclaimed excellence, not the remotest wish to do so. Perhaps ironically, notable examples such as 12-steps or SMART Recovery are user led, free and save people’s lives without any fanfare of odious self-promotion: lacking such fripperies, with no funding, they achieve far more in human terms, the only place that counts, than many areas of professional expertise.

Given our lack of capacity across the board, our amateur status and low skills base, not surprisingly we are strongly aware of the weaknesses of the website and its minimal ‘influence’. We have no ongoing human support, ongoing training, expert design staff, specialist communications teams, marketing departments etc. We are incredibly grateful to those organisations which have greater capacity whose individual members of staff have provided not only practical support including funding, training events, networking and promotion but also, as importantly, recognition and encouragement. We have been most fortunate to meet some outstanding individual staff who are so obviously driven by deep commitment to values driven by a vocation towards minimising gross health inequalities.  We fully recognise that such folk themselves are located in institutional hierarchies in which their work is sometimes devalued, and in which inevitable structural factors can be at best frustrating and at worst sources of ill health.

This is complemented by our growing engagement with many of the hundreds of ‘little’ community organisations working so very hard. Against a background of some big organisations whose main aim seems to be marked by continual self-congratulation, pride and boasting, all heavily promoted through slick media channels, the very opposite characteristics are seen in the vital on-the-ground community initiatives marked by humility, honesty and human-centred support: in any case, these organisations haven’t either the capacity and time to advertise their self-proclaimed excellence, not the remotest wish to do so. Perhaps ironically, notable examples such as 12-steps or SMART Recovery are user led, free and save people’s lives without any fanfare of odious self-promotion: lacking such fripperies, with no funding, they achieve far more in human terms, the only place that counts, than many areas of professional expertise.