I poke around the U.S. Library of Congress newspaper archives for fun sometimes (I’m a journalism nerd).
There is a striking volume of articles dating back to the 1800s about people in the U.S. who reportedly died by suicide after gambling losses. These articles don’t mention addiction, just devastating losses, as gambling addiction wasn’t a recognized concept at the time.
Pathological gambling entered the American psychiatric diagnostic manual in 1980 and was formally reclassified alongside addictions in 2013.
As we know with gambling addiction today, the newspaper archives show that gambling harm falls upon both working-class and affluent people. It knows no class.
The large volume of articles on gambling-related suicides leaves me with the impression that, for much of American newspaper history, these deaths were treated as scandals, worthy of societal concern.
Was gambling harm treated more politically, and less as an individual problem, back then? It’s complicated. Some old articles portrayed the deceased as reckless or dishonorable while also describing gambling harm as corrosive to the social order.
Public visibility is not political analysis, but it may create the possibility of political analysis.
In the U.S. today, articles about gambling-related suicides appear exceedingly rare. I recently interviewed a Pennsylvania man who lost his son to gambling, but that was a rare article for GamblingHarm.org.
People and families deserve privacy, as gambling and suicide carry stigma. In the past, perhaps families of someone who lost their life to gambling harm were harmed by newspaper coverage of the death. Newspapers were, of course, trying to sell copies. Old coverage may have been invasive and sensationalistic. Privacy and suicide-reporting standards have evolved.
Still, gambling-related suicides, in my view, can be scandals – not for the deceased or the family, but for the side that took the dead person’s money. These days, that’s often a legal industry.
Gambling is a policy question every year in state houses across the country. Gambling is also a policy issue at the federal level, even though states have historically regulated it.
But so-called responsible gambling, which closely resembles frameworks developed by the alcohol industry, has helped individualize gambling harm and effectively depoliticize it.
Whether to legalize gambling may be treated as politics. What happens after legalization is largely treated as a matter of individual behavior.
This depolitization helps leave us with remarkably little journalism about gambling-related suicides. Journalists in countries such as the U.K. and Australia still sometimes publish reporting that connects gambling-related deaths to operators and public policy. I believe this helps preserve gambling harm as a political issue in those countries, even if only faintly, in a way largely absent from much American journalism.
A return to lurid gambling-harm coverage won’t be helpful. But respectful reporting can still ask who profited and whether legal gambling as it exists today is good public policy.
