Losing Everything – Gambling Addiction

[Jaunty Guitar Music]

Mike: Welcome, everybody. This is Avoiding the Addiction Affliction brought to you by Westwords Consulting and the Kenosha County Substance Abuse Coalition. I'm Mike McGowan.

Mike: You know, gambling used to be considered a vice. Now, it seems to be viewed as entertainment. Well, what changed?

Mike: My guest today, Jerry Bauerkemper, is the retired executive director of the Nebraska Council on Compulsive Gambling. He was the first director of Problem Gambling for the state of Nebraska. He is an internationally recognized trainer on problem gambling and currently, he is a consultant for the Iowa Gambling Program, helping agencies increase gambling utilization. Jerry is also going to be one of the featured speakers at the Wisconsin Problem Gambling Association's annual conference on March 14th and 15th, the links of which are at the bottom of this podcast.

Mike: Welcome, Jerry.

Jerry: Well, good afternoon. How are you today?

Mike: I'm great. It's really a nice spring day here, so that's always good. Although you said, what, you're in Texas?

Jerry: Yeah, I live in Galveston Island, Texas, and it's nice here. We're planting already.

Mike: Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. I'm just looking out in the backyard, hoping that I don't have to do any cleanup. That's, that's where I'm at.

Mike: Well, Jerry, let's, let's get to it. It seems like gambling is everywhere. It is everywhere. But where's the line, and what constitutes compulsive gambling?

Jerry: Well, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual, which is basically a cookbook for mental health, defines the criteria for gambling as, first of all, preoccupation, thinking about it all the time.

Jerry: And when we talk about people that have disordered gambling, we're talking about people who spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about or doing gambling. Some of the rest of us, we, you know, we say, Oh boy, I'm going to Vegas in three months and we might think about that. They think about it all the time.

Jerry: I was talking with a gentleman the other day, yesterday, and he was telling me that you know, he thinks about it 24/7 and he's a sports gambler. And so he constantly planning it, thinking about it, making the wagers ruminating about the losses, et cetera. So it also talks about increased money starting out at a certain level and then increasing those time and effort and money and the inability to just make it stop.

Jerry: Many times they want it to stop, but they can't make it stop and when they do stop They get very irritable if this were a substance use disorder, they would call it, you know, irritability or withdrawal and It's the same kind of thing here. They go through withdrawal emotional spiritual mental withdrawal And they tend to gamble to escape issues. You know, they got something going on, or the gambling creates issues, and then the gambling also takes away the pain.

Jerry: So, one of the things we talk about with clients and with people that we're training is that the problem is also the answer. And so it becomes a cycle. Because if I just win, I don't have to get counseling and if I lose, I need counseling, but all I have to do is win and then I don't need you anymore.

Jerry: And it becomes that cycle, that downward cycle. They tend to chase their losses. You know, they come, what we mean by chasing is they come back to try to win it back after they lose it. And one of the criteria is lying. They lie to people about their gambling, they lie to people about their losses, they lie to people about their finances.

Jerry: They are liars. Now they're not compulsive liars, they're just protecting their game. They're protecting their gambling disorder. They jeopardize their relationships and other things around them. They jeopardize, one of the things they jeopardize on a regular basis is their progress in life.

Jerry: As you and I go through life, we tend to go from plateau to plateau. We go up, we do better, we do better, we do better. We level out, then we do a little bit better emotionally, spiritually. You know, maybe we had a practice marriage and then we're in a more stable process. This group of people, they stop.

Jerry: And they don't progress because they become fixated with gambling and with the vehicles to get the gambling. And they use other people's money to bail out. And what we mean by that is they use credit cards, they use borrowing from other people, they spend a great deal of time thinking about how to get more money because, in layman's terms, money is the drug here.

Jerry: And so they have to have it in order to get the high that gambling gives them. So, when we think about that, they may, about 30 percent of them, get into criminal activity as a result of needing money to give. So, those are the criteria. There are nine of them. And you have to have four to do that. Four and five were mild.

Jerry: Six, seven, moderate. Eight, nine, pretty severe.

Mike: I would imagine, just like with substance abuse. Denial is a huge part of it as well.

Jerry: Well, it's a bit different in that most people don't know the signs and symptoms. And it's a very hidden disorder. I mean, you don't come home drunk or high. You don't get in trouble with the law because you're drinking and driving.

Jerry: So, it's pretty hidden, and statistically, 88 percent of female spouses and 80 percent of male spouses have no idea that the person's gambling at the level they are. So, it's even hidden from the person that's supposed to be closest to you. Now, it's really hard to hide a drug problem now, so you must deny it because, you know, everybody else sees it.

Jerry: Not everybody sees this, so it's a little bit different in their denial. But when confronted with it, they will figure out a way to say, Oh, I'm better now. I'm better now. I'm better now. And so we have a lot of people that walk in the door and they say, you know, Jerry on the door and says, Jerry gambling counselor.

Jerry: They walk in and then 20 minutes later they say, I really don't need to be here. I think I'm okay.

Mike: (laugh)

Jerry: I saw a guy yesterday and he said, you know, I'm 12 days. I haven't gambled. I think I'm okay now. And I'm like, no, maybe not. Yeah. So.

Mike: Well, do you find they also tell themselves if I just can get back to even I'm out?

Jerry: Yeah, if I can get back, if I can get this loss or pay off this bill or get this person off my back, I'm better. Okay. And so, And the, and the, the, the even moves, I might be $50,000 in debt, but if I can get to this month's bills paid, then I'm good. Okay. And then we forget about the other debt for now because it's not coming at us.

Jerry: Okay, so the squeaky wheel gets the grease. And so if I could just get, and I'll be fine, and I, then I can be back to gambling and be okay. So it actually moves as the progression.

Mike: I would think, and maybe I'm wrong, you'll correct me, I'm sure, that the suicide rate is relatively high compared to the general population.

Jerry: One of the highest of all disorders, higher than substance use, higher than depression, higher than most things because it's. Way back in 1980, it first came into the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) as a impulse disorder. And what we mean by an impulse disorder is I think and then I do. It's not a compulsive disorder, like people call it.

Jerry: They're not compulsive gamblers, they're impulsive, okay? And so when they get to the, to the side where they've lost, like lost and they don't have an out, et cetera, et cetera, sometimes the easy out is the suicide because that ends the pain. And so they have a very high rate of thinking about it. One statistic was 86% I think it was, don't quote me on the exact percentage, but it's in the high eighties of people that are in Gambler's Anonymous have thought about suicide prior to going into the GA meeting. So it's very high and you need to, if you're a therapist, you need to immediately look at it because they don't act like it.

Jerry: You know, but they are contemplating many times, this counseling thing is the last effort that I do before I actually make the effort to die.

Mike: You know, you're going to talk at the conference, I saw that one of the topics you're going to address is the change in the profile of the gambler since like 1990, that part of the reason I, I mean.

Mike: We have, I think, I'm going to read what I saw, again, correct me if I'm wrong, we have around 900 land based casinos in the United States, but now about 18,000 electronic gaming sites.

Jerry: Yeah, let me talk about that, and we've had, from the 1980s on, we've had a constant increase in gambling throughout the United States.

Jerry: You know, and in the 1970s, we had Atlantic City and Las Vegas, Nevada, and they were basically the gambling. And then we had some illegal places that you could go at the local bars, etc. They've always had those. Then when the states decided to get involved, and they first decided to get involved in the lottery, And if you remember right, when the states got involved in the lottery in the 1980s, I mean, there were people saying it's going to be the end of life in general, and we're all going to be sinners and everything like that.

Jerry: Well, now it turns out the lottery is the least of our issues when it comes to gambling, because the states have taken on, and the Native American tribes have taken on gambling in most states, 48 of them. Hawaii and Utah haven't come to that realization yet, but everybody else has what we call class three gaming.

Jerry: And class three gaming is casino based, but we also have the bingos and the lotteries and the Kenos and the, and the horse racing and all those, so we haven't lost anything other than dogs basically but we've gained more types of gambling. So the, the landscape has changed. We've gone from it being Sin City to everyday use.

Jerry: We've gone to it being taboo in the major leagues to it being talked about on the sports as what's the, what's the, the percentage of, you know, they're going to win and what's the, the line and what's the, the, the prop bets, what I mean by prop bets. You can bet whether or not that's heads or tails.

Jerry: On the coin flip. All of those are being promoted now instead of when Pete Rose was around. It was like, okay, you can never go into the hall of fame because you gambled. Now it's promoted. And so we have an entire culture now that it is free to do. It is not, it is not stigmatized as a negative.

Jerry: In the same time, in the time that we've been destigmatizing gambling, we've also stigmatized substance use disorder. We've criminalized it. You can't drink and drive. And then we've decriminalized it. We can smoke marijuana legally now. So we've gone full circle with substance use. But gambling has been 100 percent from Sin City to culturally acceptable.

Mike: Well, and with the internet and cell phones, it's a click away. One of the changes that I've noticed is that my son, I have three kids, they're all in their 20s. Many of their generation don't even root anymore for a team. They root for their own fantasy team and they keep track during the games. You can even bet during the game that they keep encouraging you to place new bets.

Jerry: Right. In 2018, we did a study of college students because those people were legally of age, okay, not illegally of age, but legally of age. And we found that 29 percent of people of the college kids, there was 512 I think of them that we interviewed and 29, almost 30 percent of them had played fantasy games out of either DraftKings or then FanDuel, et cetera. And clearly about 30 percent of those 29 percent admitted that they were in trouble already as college students. And, and so. We have people, they don't care about whether Detroit beats San Francisco. They care about which receiver got more yards, which quarterbacks in which, you know, so they, they become desensitized to what traditionally was the game.

Jerry: I'm, you know, I'm a, I'm a Texans fan. So I root for Texans. Well, I don't care about the Texans anymore. I only care about Stroud and what he did. And the rest of them, I don't care. I don't care about because I have receivers from another team and so it absolutely takes the fun quote fun out of the game because you are now rooting for not teams, but individuals and they could be multiple teams so you don't get that same loyalty piece going on that we used to when we, I'm not saying it's better or worse.

Jerry: I'm saying that's the change. And when you take away the loyalty factor of that process, you make it more of like a business deal. And that's how they do it. You know, it's just part of what I do, instead of, you know, I grew up in Nebraska. And I'm a Nebraska Cornhusker fan and I wear the red and I do this and they're terrible and I don't care, but I'm still there.

Mike: (laugh) Yep.

Jerry: Now, as a fantasy, I don't care about Nebraska. I don't care. I don't even care that they're red. Okay. I don't care if they win or lose against Wisconsin. I don't care. Okay. Because I only care about certain players. And that's, and it becomes a different mentality. And it's easier to bet on those kinds of things because you're, you're not betting on one thing. You're betting on multiple things and multiple people.

Mike: Well, and the house wins.

Jerry: Always.

Mike: Okay. Which means that most people who are doing this lose more often than they win, which would then lead to other mental health issues like anxiety, stress, depression.

Jerry: Well, one of the things we've found with COVID, COVID changed everything.

Jerry: Now, COVID changed the fact that people aren't going to casinos at the same rates. They're going to online casinos because they had to get used to that because the casinos shut down. So people got online. And what we traditionally knew that slot machines were the most addictive forms of gambling, we now find that online is much more addictive than the slot machine and the slot machine was pretty addictive. Okay, because of the speed of the game, because of the in game bets and the prop bets and the, you can constantly wager when you're doing that. I saw a statistic about 77 percent of people who gamble online have at least two criteria that would lead them towards problem gambling. So we have sped the game up. We've even sped sports up. And we've sped everything up so fast that you can lose your shirt while sitting at home. So somewhere along the line. The game has changed and the goalposts have changed. And for people that work with people that have gambling issues, we have a harder time getting to people who are at home than we do it at the casinos or the bingo parlors, because we can put signs up and everything like that.

Jerry: And we used to get all kinds of phone calls at our helplines, but our helplines that young people don't call helplines, they use the computer. And so, like in Iowa last year, we went from 30,000 inquiries about gambling problems to 120,000 online while our helpline stayed static. So we're going to have to change the way we think about how to get people involved in treatment.

Jerry: And we've moved from face to face treatment to remote. We're doing it online now, much like we're doing podcasts, instead of me sitting in a studio with you, we're doing it from different states, and that's where we're headed, and that's where we're going, but that's a different mentality and a different way of thinking about how to help people and how to get to people who have problems, because traditionally we've never gotten to sports gamblers because they were gambling with bookings.

Jerry: But now they're gambling at casinos, but they're not really at casinos. They're just on the casino apps. And so, you know, so now we have to get into their apps and that's not as easy as you think it would be to get a problem gambling message to an app.

Mike: Well, let's talk about the families for a minute because I, you know, you're right about, you know, if you come home drunk, everybody knows it.

Jerry: Yep.

Mike: But sometimes family members wouldn't find out there's even a problem until the roof caves in.

Jerry: Until the crisis, the overall crisis, until the house of cards fall. Generally, what we find is with family members is that they have given up the finances and so they don't know what's going on. And so the person's robbing Peter to pay Paul doesn't have enough money to do that. I mean, I had a guy many, many years ago, he came in and he said, well, I got, I got $60 for the family's groceries for this month and I got $3,000 to gamble. Okay. And he thought that was perfectly acceptable.

Jerry: Okay. Because you can go to, to the food banks and get food. They'll give it away to you. In fact, they have to give it away to you. That was his mentality. Okay. And the family bought into that thinking they didn't, they didn't have much money. So they had, you know, of course adjusted and gone to the food banks and the clothing places and the things like that.

Jerry: And they thought that was strictly normal behavior. They did not know that the gambler that much money to gamble with. Okay, so they don't know. And so they begin to normalize less and less and less and not really questioned all of that. I had another guy who was he was making over a $100,000 a year and he had, you know, $30,000 or $40,000 worth of expenses every month.

Jerry: But he told his wife he was making $60,000 this year, but he had to take all his expenses out. And they didn't reimburse those. So he only had $30,000 a year to work with. And they believed that because he did the finances. Okay. And it works the other way females do the same thing. I mean, this just happened to be two males.

Jerry: When I first started in 1986, most people coming in were male. In 2024, it was 50/50.

Mike: Is the gambling similar? What is the difference between male and female gambling?

Jerry: Well, in 1980s, if you looked on the casino floor, what you're getting is 80% of the floor is table games and there's very few women there.

Jerry: And now you see 80% of the floor is slot machines. everybody's there. And so one of the things we've learned is that, that most people are coming into treatment now. Well, prior to COVID, we're coming in with slot machine players. Okay. Because it's the speed of the game that killed them.

Jerry: The average length of time between the time they started and the time they were in trouble with 18 months to two years. But now we're starting because of COVID, we're starting to see people, they, after COVID, we immediately decided to legalize sports betting and because we can do it on apps and you can bet on most anything, you could bet on cricket, you know, or Australians rules football at 3:00 AM in the morning.

Jerry: They'll, it's 24/7 and the speed's gone up, plus you get all the prop bets, et cetera, on the inline bets, in game bets, et cetera. And now we're getting more sports bets to come in and there are two different types of gamblers. One is more of an escapist gambler. And the other is more of a gambler that's a little more skill based and a little more narcissistic.

Jerry: Not diagnosable narcissistic, but more, most like a cocaine user, you know, and that they feel bigger than life. And even if they've lost everything, they're still, you know, they want to control the process because that's what their mentality is. As opposed to the slot machine player, which is just basically given up.

Jerry: So, so two different types and we're, and we're starting to get more of a balance of the two. The difficulty is that for the last 15 or 20 years, we've had mostly slot machines players come in. So all the new counselors have seen very few sports gamblers. So we're having to train them on how to work with people that have sports gambling issues.

Jerry: So we're always behind the trend when in working with problem gambling, because the industry is always ahead of us.

Mike: And, you know, and if I can say something, it's going to sound a little judgmental, but it's just an observation. You know, it's hard to watch somebody gamble from their app on their phone.

Mike: But if I watch a show and flip through the channels and I watch, say, a poker tournament, well, one of the things I recognize, notice is that one, nobody looks happy and two, they don't look real healthy, Jerry.

Jerry: Nope. It is stressful to gamble and it is isolating to gamble and it is difficult to, even if you're winning, to be happy about winning because it's, it is a chore.

Jerry: Now, the high is when we, there was some research done maybe 20 years ago of cocaine users and gambling that they had both issues. And they said the cocaine was easier to stop than the gambling because the high of gambling is higher than the high of cocaine, which we all know that cocaine people are, you know, they're like bulletproof when they're on cocaine.

Jerry: And so that's difficult for them to be that and still not happy. It's almost like being very, very spiritual, only not quite. Believing in God, only not quite. (chuckle) Okay. Believing in miracles, but they never really happen. And that's what we're talking about here. We're talking about people who just never quite reached the peak and they keep seeking the peak, but they never reached the peak.

Jerry: You know, it's like the old adage, an alcoholic walks into a bar and it says, All you can drink for a dollar. And he says, give me $2 worth. That's the gambler. (laugh)

Mike: You know, you're right. I don't frequent places very often, but I have occasionally walked into a casino and you know, I, when they put their little card into the slot machine that's around their neck and when they win.

Mike: And there's the expression doesn't change at all and i'm thinking you just won $40. That's a meal somewhere get out of here.

Jerry: Right.

Mike: But there's a difference in what i'm thinking, right?

Jerry: Yes. See it's a brain thing okay, so let me let me put it in as easiest terms as I can. There's part of the brain that works with gamblers that have gambling issues is the Amygdala. Now the amygdala is the fight or flight part.

Jerry: It's a fear based process Okay? And so winning is not satiating, it's just slowing down the fear. Okay? Now, I mean, I know that's oversimplifying it, but the rest of us work out of the frontal cortex of our brain, and it's the cognitive part, it's the thinking part that says, this is really stupid, what am I doing here?

Jerry: You know, I just won $40, I better go get the steak I need. (chuckle) Okay. The gambler doesn't work out of that part of the brain. And all of our research tells us this soon as they start gambling, the frontal part of their brain just goes quiet and they cannot think rationally again, and so the longer they gamble.

Jerry: The more, the more years they gamble or the more months they gamble, the less they can think out of that cognitive piece. So the treatment of this is to light back up the top, the front part of their brain. That's not as easy as you think. Okay. For those people, think about people who are, are needing to eat every day and they don't know where their next meal is coming from.

Jerry: It's really hard for them to be self actualized when you're not eating. Well, that's kind of like where we at with gamblers when they come into treatment. They don't know any other way. They have no relationships. They're tremendous debt. So they're scared to death about that. You know, average amount of debt is, you know, over 70 percent of them have over $25,000 worth of gambling debt. Now you can't find another disorder that puts you that far in debt in, in that short of time, in two years. In fact, the guy I was talking to yesterday, he said, you know, there are days when I would spend thousands and thousands to gamble and I'm going, okay.

Jerry: As a social worker, I don't think I've ever had thousands and thousands to use somewhere else. So it's hard for me to think like that. But that's the way they think. And so, when they do decide to come in, they're in the fight or flight piece, and they're not thinking clearly. And so, the treatment is to move from the Amygdala to the front part of their brain and have them be, have rational thinking processes.

Jerry: And unlike substance use, where 30 days into a treatment center, you're starting to feel a little better if you stop using because the drugs are starting to get out of your system, 30 days into treatment for gambling, everything gets worse because the bills come and now you're not gambling and you don't have any money.

Jerry: And now you got to tell everybody I'm six months behind my bill and I can't pay it. The guy that I talked with yesterday, he says his dad bailed him out of about $20,000 in order to pay the people that he owed. These are people he borrowed money from. And I said, well, how much do you owe your dad? He said, well, I owe him at least 50,000.

Jerry: Well, that's, that's someone he owes. That's not necessarily his credit cards and everything else. He says he owes a lot of other people, but that's just his dad. I mean, so when he walks into treatment yesterday to talk to me, he says, you know, I think I can handle this financially. I'm going like, walk me through how you can handle this financially.

Jerry: Because that's the way they think. I just one went away from not needing you. I think I can handle this.

Mike: What does recovery look like, Jerry?

Jerry: Well, gamblers always ask me the same question. What, you know, what do I got to do to get out of this treatment center? You know, to stop, you know, to be in recovery.

Jerry: And I say, well, you know, you had seven of these criteria. You did all, you know, of the criteria when those are alleviated, it'll be time for you to leave. Okay. But here's how I view... and I tell them about recovery. Two years from now, or three years now, four years from now, you meet somebody and they had no idea that you ever had a gambling problem because your life is so full of other things that are going on in your life.

Jerry: Then we'll know you're in recovery, but right now, when they come in, they have no social life, you know, because they, they're thinking about gambling all the time that's becomes their social life and they have little plan for the future because they're so far. In debt and they can only think about the intermittent reinforcement they're getting from gambling.

Jerry: And so we have that they have to have goals. They have to have social lives. They have to have, you know, people that at first were the first step of, of gamblers anonymous, alcoholics anonymous, and cocaine anonymous, the word we, we got to put we back in their life. And they, because they walk in and the first thing they say is, I have done this and I'm doing this.

Jerry: And when I stop hearing the word, I, and I hear, oh, I talked with so and so and we're going to, and he suggested or she suggested I do this and so I think we're going to do this. Then I'll know that recovery has begun. I mean, I've got a guy that's another sports better. Every word out of his mouth is, well, I've decided that.

Jerry: And he's three months into treatment. It has yet to decide that we is more important in recovery than I. And, no one quote normal people see the word as, I can do this all by myself. Everybody has someone or some process in their life that includes other people. Socially, spiritually, financially, et cetera.

Jerry: I is the Amygdala. I gotta run, I gotta fight, I gotta do this. And it's not cognitive. And so, we do some cognitive stuff, we do some meditation stuff and so, we do a lot of things, and I tell people, you know, much like in Alcoholics Anonymous, you know, screw your, screw your feelings, change your behaviors and your feelings will follow, that's what I say, we're, first thing we're gonna do is start changing your behaviors.

Mike: Do you tell them to turn their phone off? Do you tell them to turn their computer off?

Jerry: Well, first of all, I figure out where they're gambling and how they're gambling. And then we start to shut those things down. Okay? I call them barriers. I liken it to when you're driving down the highway and the Department of Roads wants you to go from two lanes to one lane, they give you signs.

Mike: (laugh)

Jerry: And it says in two miles, you're going to have to do this. And then those of us that are smart, we just stay in the same lane because we're better than that. So a mile out, they do it again. Okay. We've got one mile and then a half a mile. We got that going on. And pretty soon they put up these barriers and they say, you will be moving over or die, you know, make a call.

Jerry: And so that's what I do. I put up barriers so that they start running down a line and bouncing off the wall because they do. But they still stay along that line until such time as they're able to think clearly about what lane they want to be in. And generally research tells us that if they get in recovery, their life will be much better than even it was projected before they got involved in gambling.

Jerry: The research tells us that. It also tells us that about substance use, et cetera. If you're in recovery from substance use and you're doing well, your ceiling goes higher because you don't have that encumbrance and you also, and you've already added we into your life.

Jerry: And so you're not fighting these battles anymore. And so, same thing with gambling, that's what we're trying to get is we and cognitive thinking, and the ability to do behaviors that are better for you. And I tell gamblers, my goal isn't to stop you gambling. My goal is for you to make a rational decision, whether or not you should.

Jerry: And some people, they decide they want to gamble again. The average person gambles two or three times while in treatment. And, you know, this guy that I was talking to yesterday, he's, he's been in treatment three times. He gambled all the way through them. So it's not an easy process.

Mike: (chuckle) You know, this has been fascinating.

Mike: You know, it is. There are parallels, certainly, to the other topics we've all talked about. But there's differences, too, which I think is the point of the conference you're going to speak at.

Jerry: Right.

Mike: Because you can't just, behind your name, in psychology today, say, Yeah, I'm an expert on gambling addiction, too.

Mike: You have to know what you're talking about.

Jerry: Yeah, there are some differences. We're not talking about the ability to easily stop this. We're talking about finances being issues. You know, if we talk about most mental health counselors, most substance use counselors, if we ask them, have you ever done a budget with your clients?

Jerry: They'll say, man, I, the only question I ever ask is, do you have insurance and how will you pay this? And that's as far as I go in the area of finances, but money's the drug here. So if you want to track whether that they're continuing to gamble or getting off the bet, one of the two, you follow the money.

Jerry: So we do a lot of financial work with them. That's not, you know, doing budgets are easy if you're willing to do it. Okay. So one of the things that we've talked about for the last 25 years is do a budget, find out where the money is, find out what they owe. Because if the creditors are still calling, they're still gambling.

Jerry: Because if you've ever had creditors call you all the time and all the time, way too stressful. And the easy way out of that is to go gamble and then pay them. I had a guy, he wanted a Cadillac, so he went and bought a Cadillac and he wrote a bad check. Okay. This was back when they didn't, you know, immediately find out whether or not you're okay. (laugh)

Jerry: So then he said, okay, I got a bad check for like $5,000. I'm going to go to the casino and win it. So he wrote a bad check to the casino and gambled. And lost it, wrote another bad check to the casino and then he lost that money. So he came back . He's got two bad checks out to the casino. He's got a bad check out to the Cadillac dealer. But what do you think he did? He sold the Cadillac. That was his way of getting out from underneath this. Does that make any sense to a normal human being? But it does when you are in the Amygdala part of your brain, your fight or flight. He was getting out from underneath that because he knew the casinos were going to prosecute him for a bad check.

Jerry: So he sold the Cadillac and I said, what do you think the Cadillac dealer's going to do? He said, well, I can pay them on payments. (laugh)

Mike: I'd be so stressed. It would be unbelievable.

Jerry: (chuckle) Ya, and so even recovery is stressful. You know, the GAF scores, we had this thing in the the last DSM where we had to just, they call it a GAF score. It was basically a life scale. And so as you're in treatment, your life scale should go up. Okay.

Jerry: You should feel, start feeling better. Well, the gamblers kept feeling worse. Because treatment means no gambling. Treatment means responsibility. Treatment means everybody knows, and I'm under tremendous stress. If I have to tell my spouse or my, my dad or my so and so or my work that I've got a gambling issue, that's tremendously stressful.

Jerry: Because I could get fired. I could get disowned. I could get divorced. I could be in court tomorrow just by telling people that I have a gambling issue. And I could never get hired again. I mean, I have a guy who said to me, if I tell the place that I'm working, that I have a gambling problem, I'll get fired and I'll be out of that industry in a matter of seconds.

Jerry: You see, so it's, it's the stigma of it. If I tell somebody I got an alcohol problem, but I went to the Betty Ford Center, I'm going to have a parade on the way in comparatively to gambling, who says I'm in gambling treatment. That, you know, I had a guy who's was in a bank, he was pretty important in the bank, but if he told them, they would lose faith in, you know, because nobody wants the bank to be someplace where people that "gamble" are, you see, so it's still in a stigma, maybe 30-40 years ago.

Mike: Well, hopefully this breaks through all of that.

Mike: For those of you who are in the Midwest and are able to go to the conference, it certainly would be worth your while to do so.

Mike: Thanks so much for spending the time with us. This has been so enjoyable.

Jerry: It's been fun for me too.

Mike: Yeah. For those of you who are listening please listen next time. And until next time, stay safe, stay sane, and work off that frontal lobe a little bit.

Jerry: (chuckle) Thank you.