Gambling Addiction Is More Common Than People Think

I was recently a guest on The Drive with Spence Checketts on ESPN 700 here in Salt Lake City. Spence brought me on to talk about the Brendan Sorsby case, a college football quarterback whose legal team successfully argued that his gambling addiction entitled him to continue playing. Spence framed it well: “You wouldn’t make an alcoholic a Jack Daniels rep. So if you’re asking us to believe this situation… it doesn’t seem all that conducive to recovery to put a sports gambling addict right in the epicenter of sports.”

I agreed. And I want to use that conversation as a starting point, because gambling addiction is something I see in my practice, and it deserves a more serious look than it usually gets.

What gambling addiction actually looks like

Most people think of gambling as a casino problem, slot machines, card tables, the kind of thing that happens in Las Vegas. The reality is broader. Gambling addiction now includes sports betting through apps that are available on any phone, casino games played online from a couch, daily fantasy sports, and increasingly, prediction markets, platforms where people bet real money on the outcomes of political events, economic data, and other real-world outcomes.

The common thread is not the format. It’s the pattern: the inability to stop, the cravings, the continuation despite serious consequences. Gambling can take someone out financially in hours. It can destroy relationships and careers over months or years. And because the behavior itself is legal and increasingly normalized, people often don’t recognize how far things have gone until the damage is done.

Why accountability matters in treatment

One of the things I said on the show that I want to expand on here: a central part of treating any addiction is helping people face the consequences of their behavior. Not as punishment, but because accountability is how people learn that the pattern isn’t working.

When someone gets bailed out, whether by a parent, an attorney, or a court, it short-circuits that process. The lesson the brain takes away is that the behavior didn’t really cost anything. That makes the next relapse more likely, not less.

This is why it matters where a person in recovery is placed. Putting someone with a sports gambling addiction back into a professional sports environment, surrounded by odds and outcomes and betting culture, isn’t treatment. It’s exposure without support.

What treatment actually looks like

Recovery from gambling addiction looks similar to recovery from other addictions. In my experience, it usually takes at least two years of real work. That typically means some combination of individual therapy, group therapy, and depending on the severity, a period of more intensive outpatient or residential treatment.

Group therapy is often the most powerful piece. People in recovery frequently hear things from peers that they won’t take in from a therapist. There’s something about accountability to other people who understand the pull that cuts through the denial in a way that one-on-one sessions can’t always reach.

The family is also part of the picture. Families often enable addiction without realizing it, covering debts, minimizing the problem, or providing a soft landing that removes the consequence. Family involvement in treatment is not about blame. It’s about building a system where recovery is actually possible.

When to get help

If you’re gambling more than you intend to, chasing losses, hiding it from people who are close to you, or finding that it’s affecting your finances or relationships, those are signs worth paying attention to. The same is true if someone you care about is showing those patterns.

The work of individual therapy in Salt Lake City that we do at Peterson Family Therapy includes addiction recovery. We start with an honest assessment of where someone is and what level of care makes sense. For some people, that’s weekly sessions. For others, it means something more intensive first.

If you’re not sure where you fall, that’s what the assessment is for. Reach out and we can figure it out together.