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When gambling is the problem

For people in the United States whose gambling is hurting them, and for the people who love them. A free helpline that answers at any hour. The signs, honestly. Getting through an urge. Putting things in the way. Treatment and meetings. The debts. What families can do, and what they shouldn’t. And the words to say when you call. One thing at a time.

A word with a dotted line under it, like this, opens its official definition, quoted from a U.S. government glossary.

Your mood, your thoughts, sleep, worry or an urge, and not sure this is the right page? The pages on this site for thoughts of suicide and self-harm, depression, bipolar, anxiety, OCD, trauma, psychosis, eating, drinking and gambling, sleep, grief, ADHD, autism and memory, on one list.

This page and its wording were written with AI (Claude) for Scarlet Beast (our AI policy). The facts come from pages read on October 1, 2026: MedlinePlus (the U.S. National Library of Medicine); the National Council on Problem Gambling, which runs the helpline; Gamblers Anonymous; Gam-Anon; SMART Recovery; BetBlocker; the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; and the 988 Lifeline. Changed on October 9, 2026: until that day about twenty lines here came from a MedlinePlus medical encyclopedia article. Its publisher does not allow that text to be reused, so we took those lines out. Most now give what the National Council on Problem Gambling says on its own pages, read again that day. Gone, because no page we can use says them: the nine-item list of what a clinician looks for, anything on medicines, and the lines on stress, on the age at which gambling problems start, on depression and anxiety, on people denying the problem, and on how common it is to gamble again after treatment. From MedlinePlus the page now uses only the short Compulsive Gambling page that the National Library of Medicine wrote itself. Apart from MedlinePlus, the CFPB and 988, these are private organisations describing their own services, and the page says whose words it is passing on. Added on October 14, 2026: New Jersey’s self-exclusion program, as one state’s example (its Division of Gaming Enforcement); what 1-800-GAMBLER is; the IRS on taxes on winnings and losses; the federal courts’ Bankruptcy Basics, linked; and Gam-Anon’s page for parents, all read that day. The American Academy of Pediatrics article on teens and online gambling is linked but not summarised, because its terms do not allow its content to be used with AI tools; Mayo Clinic’s terms forbid automated access, so we do not use it. We did not read any other state’s rules on self-exclusion, the legal age to bet, what any state or insurer pays for, or any bank’s gambling blocks. The Federal Trade Commission’s page still refused our connection. We did not find the Gam-Anon hotline’s hours. Many lines are our own suggestions, and the page marks them as ours. The banner across this site that says “Bet On You” is about a free software development offer; it is not gambling, and we know the wording sits badly on this page. Scarlet Beast also builds a poker-playing AI as an open-source software project elsewhere on this site; you should know that when you weigh this page. This page saves nothing: no account, no cookies, nothing you tick is stored or sent, and no analytics (privacy). Scarlet Beast is not a treatment provider or a government agency, and takes no money from anyone named here. Found a mistake? Email [email protected].