‘High-stakes gambling: Overrepresentation of gambling harm among help-seeking communities in the NW of England.’

Understanding the scale of serious gambling problems is fundamental to any policy or effort to address the harms and support those affected by it. Yet even assuming accurate statistics for gambling problems at a national or regional level, there is a critical need to assess the distribution of problems across population subsets and communities. We estimated the prevalence of the most serious gambling behaviours, sampling amongst a help-seeking population approaching a foodbank in 2023. Over 3% of respondents experienced major gambling harm. We argue that more widespread identification of gambling harms would enable the development of better support for gambling harm and facilitate more sensitivity to the environments and places where it is experienced.