The husband of a woman who killed herself after getting into $100,000 of debt due to gambling said that British Columbian casinos need to have more support in place.
Lost battle
Yoo Choi had moved to Vancouver and opened the Velvet Cafe based on Broadway. But, as her husband, Mark Dawson, explained, she had a compulsive gambling habit which she kept a secret but had been battling to deal with over a number of years.
After she had managed to get into $150,000 of debt playing at Edgewater Casino in Vancouver, she eventually registered herself into an exclusion program. Here she received counseling and her husband believed that she had managed to overcome her addiction.
But, on June the 16th she phoned him, apologizing for the fact that she had started to gamble again. After this, she disappeared only to be found 26 days later floating in Lynn Canyon which is located on Vancouver’s North Shore.
Increased suicide risk
Dawson expressed his regret at not being aware that a problem gambler is two times more likely to commit suicide than any other form of addict.
“If I had known, I might have been able to take her home,” he said. “It wasn’t on my radar at all. I might have been able to say, ‘let me hear you start the car, stay on the phone with me while you drive home.’”
Gambling addictions that lead to suicide are not that uncommon. It was revealed that one man who murdered first his partner and then himself back in January had lost $200,000 in a local casino. Back in 2002 another man killed his wife, set fire to their home, then committed suicide. An inquest later found that he had got into financial difficulties due to gambling.
It is estimated that 200 problem gamblers commit suicide every year in Canada. In BC alone, the Coroners Service released that there were 34 suicides related to gambling between 2003 and 2010.
According to Professor Robert Williams, it is hard to truly estimate the figure due to the fact that in general a suicide is not linked officially to gambling. Williams, an expert in gambling addictions at the Alberta Gambling Research Institute as well as teacher at the University of Lethbridge, estimates that in Alberta about 20 percent of suicides are related to gambling in some way. Also, as per his estimate, for each person who kills themselves due to problem gambling, four others try but fail.
Program ineffective
At the Edgewater Casino and in other BC-Based casinos, facial recognition technology is used to help keep out problem gamblers who have put themselves on the voluntary self-exclusion program. Yoo Choi herself was escorted out of Edgewater a number of times. But, Dawson sees the program as ineffective in that there was no penalty connected to her lapses and he was not made aware of them.
“It’s a wake-up call … If you know somebody, be a little bit more aware of the repercussions,” Dawson said. “It can go, as I found out, beyond rock bottom.”