Rapacious gambling giants drove our son to suicide. How many more must die before they’re shamed into action?

AYEAR ago today our 24-year- old son, Jack, took his own life in Hanoi, Vietnam, where he was working as an English teacher.

He’d spent the day gambling online, an addiction he’d been fighting since he was 17.

For 18 months he’d been pretty much free of gambling, but days before his death he was lured back in — we suspect by an advert from an online gambling company with a free offer.

In his suicide note to us, he wrote: ‘I’m past the point of controlling myself and I’m not coming back from this one.’

His death came out of the blue. One of us (Liz) is a retired consultant psychotherapist, who has worked with people contemplating suicide. She knows the risk factors to look for, but they weren’t there.

We are marking today quietly with our other two children, but we are also turning our grief and anger into something positive. As co-founders of the pressure group Gambling with Lives, we are working alongside other families bereaved by gambling-related suicides to get this issue higher on the national agenda.

Illegal

As the Mail reported yesterday, the number of problem gamblers aged 11- 16 has quadrupled in two years to 55,000, with 70,000 more judged ‘ at risk’, according to the Gambling Commission.

They bet on fruit machines, on bingo, online or in betting shops — all of which are illegal for the under-18s.

Two in three children say they’ve seen gambling adverts on TV, and almost a million have been exposed to gambling themes in computer games or smartphone apps.

Jack’s problems started when he was at school in Sheffield and went into a betting shop with friends during his lunchbreak to play on fixed odds betting terminals (FOBTs). Back then, he saw it as ‘fun’.

They are not fun, and neither are their online equivalents. They have been designed with great sophistication, drawing on the expertise of neuroscientists to make the chemical ‘hit’ in the brain stronger, and the addiction deeper.

FOBTs are specifically intended to undermine the thinking processes and to make players more impulsive — by the speed of play, and the sounds, lights and messages about ‘near misses’.

You are made to think that you’ve so nearly won, and so you carry on . . . and on. Jack had lost £1,000 in the year before he told us what had been happening.

And that is how the gambling companies want it. They are constantly working to find ever better ways to lure our children into gambling.

Gambling bosses are, we believe, implicated in the targeting of young people to get them hooked on an addiction that — like drugs and alcohol, with which it is grouped by the American Psychiatric Association — can kill them.

Which is why we find it particularly upsetting to read today that the Bet365’s chief executive, Denise Coates CBE, already Britain’s best- paid boss, this year received a £ 48 million rise, taking her annual pay to £265 million.

These companies know they are peddling addictive, potentially lethal products — as independent research confirms. Even William Hill’s website warns that gambling addicts are four times more likely to have suicidal thoughts than the rest of the population. This is beyond immoral.

We see it is a double form of abuse. First Jack was abused when he went into a betting shop, where he was groomed and turned into an addict.

And then he was told, in effect, by the gambling industry that he was somehow weak, that he was to blame for being addicted as a young person. It is reminiscent of the antics of the tobacco industry years ago, and is meant to divert attention from the fact this industry is based on designing products that are highly addictive and damaging.

Our son did not conform to the stereotype of a gambler. If he was vulnerable, it was because he was bright, outgoing, impulsive — and male.

These are qualities that help young men get on, but can also cause their downfall when they are exposed to gambling.

This issue has to be taken more seriously by government. The other one of us (Charles) is a retired senior civil servant who would like to see responsibility for gambling moved from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport — where the gambling industry is regarded as an economic asset via the taxes generated and the urban regeneration potential of supercasinos — to where this health crisis really belongs, the Department of Health.

Jack consulted his GP on several occasions when he relapsed and began gambling again at university. He had put blocking software on his computer to stop access to online gambling sites but he knew this, and his own inner resources, were not sufficient.

Addiction

There is almost no treatment available for gambling addiction on the NHS, and what there is aims to return the sufferer to a ‘responsible’ level of gambling. We need, as a matter of urgency, to take gambling addiction just as seriously as alcohol or drug addiction and develop effective treatments.

Gambling is not something that goes away with a bit of will power. We are guilty of having thought that once. Now we know better. If it was, Jack would have beaten it.

GPs need much more training around this. Yes, it will be expensive at a time when the NHS is hard-pressed, but we firmly believe the gambling industry should contribute to the costs through a statutory levy of one per cent (rather than the current 0.1 per cent voluntary contribution) of their profits in recognition of the damage they do.

They won’t accept it easily. We have seen how powerful the gambling lobby is recently after the Government’s U-turn on limiting stakes on FOBTs — a delay of six months in slashing the maximum stake from £100 to £2.

Fortunately, the courage of minister Tracey Crouch, who resigned over the matter, plus huge cross-party and public support, saw off the threat. We need to build on that.

Our main demand is for a public health campaign to warn about the tragedies gambling can cause, for unsafe gambling products to be removed from the market, for more independent research — and more regulation.

Risks

Jack Skyped us three days before he died. He’d been in Hanoi for three months and was loving it, as his Facebook posts show and his large circle of friends there have confirmed to us. He had given us no grounds to worry. But during that Skype call he told us that ‘the old problem is back’. He’d lost £1,500 online gambling.

We spoke to him for an hour. He reassured us he was all right, and not depressed. We thought we’d cheered him up.

Then came the email with the suicide note attached — something that as a parent you cannot begin to imagine. We will remember that experience today — as we do every day — and it is why we want to warn other parents of the risks.

Jack thought he had beaten his gambling addiction but it had beaten him.

He blamed himself. But we know who is really to blame, and it is time that, as a society, we took on the gambling industry that is destroying young lives.