‘I used to gamble for 24 hours at a time’

A recovering gambling addict has shared how she stopped food shopping and heating her home to fund her gambling habit.

Kiki Marriott, a client at Colwyn Bay’s Parkland Place Rehabilitation Centre, told the BBC that she prioritised paying for electricity and Wi-Fi for online gambling over daily essentials. Using her mobile phone, she would often bet for more than 24 hours until she used up her money.

At her “catastrophic point”, the 40-year-old stole a significant amount of money from her former partner to gamble and planned to end her life.

‘Slow and painful’

Marriott said her mindset — “just to do anything that you needed to do to still enable you to gamble” — led her not to care whether she “lived or died”.

“It was like a slow and painful death. I used to pray to die and just think ‘I can’t wait for this to be over’. I wrote letters to the train driver, to the passengers, and apologised for the trauma that I was about to cause them by ending my life at the train station”.

But after calling GamCare’s National Gambling Helpline, she reflected, “I knew that my death would have caused more trauma on other people and I just couldn’t do it”.

She is now developing strategies to cope with her habit, and aims to “lean” on the support of “other women in recovery”.

Online slots

Abbie Harvey, who has also received support at Parkland Place Rehabilitation Centre, lost more than £20,000 to gambling over ten years.

The 34-year-old, who mainly gambled on her phone through online slots, said: “The scheming, the lying, it just took over my whole life.

“I would do it at four o’clock in the morning, I would do it at two o’clock in the afternoon. I would wake up in the middle of the night and all I wanted to do was gamble online. I’d be driving home from my sister’s, which is like 20 minutes away from me, and I couldn’t even wait 20 minutes before pulling over and doing online slots.”

The manager of Parkland Place, Cheryl Williams, highlighted the “stigma” women experience when trying to access help, since only one in four of its attendees are women.