UK MPs have used gambling-related rates of suicide figures to request a government review of gambling laws, but sector analysts believe the reported numbers are misleading.

In a letter sent to Parliament last week, MP Layla Moran, chair of the Health and Social Care Select Committee, said the government should undertake a second review of the Gambling Act.

That letter highlighted the committee’s findings that gambling was connected to high rates of harm and suicide in the UK. It cited data from the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) in 2023, which estimated there were between 117 and 496 suicides associated with problem gambling every year.

However, a number of industry analysts have expressed concern over the use of this data, which has been regarded by some as misleading and based on erroneous studies conducted with incorrect methodologies.

Melanie Ellis, partner at Northridge law firm, tells iGB: “It’s frustrating that the letter leads with the debunked estimate of 117 to 496 gambling-related suicides every year in England.

“Ultimately, I think it very unlikely that this letter will prompt a further review of the Gambling Act, while work on implementing the 2023 white paper’s recommendations is ongoing.”

The origin of the numbers started with the UK’s first state-sponsored calculation of gambling-related suicides in 2021. Public Health England released a report that stated in England there were 409 suicides a year associated with gambling harm.

This study was subsequently replaced by a 2023 update from the OHID that reported the number of gambling-related suicides as between 117 and 496.

Dan Waugh, partner at Regulus Partners, stated in a 2024 report that both the OHID and Public Health England had based their estimates on a 2018 study of the medical records of patients treated in Swedish hospitals between 2006 and 2016. That study was conducted by Dr Anna Karlsson and Professor Anders Håkansson from Lund University.

Public Health England applied the suicide mortality ratios in the Swedish study – that problem gamblers were 15.1 times more likely to take their own life – and used them to come to a figure of 409 problem gambling-related deaths a year in the UK.

OHID then repeated the same methodology in 2023 to reach the figure of suicide associated with gambling disorder between 117 and 409.

“In doing so they ignored critical information and clear warnings that their methods were unsound,” Waugh insists.

“The hospital patients whose records were analysed in the ‘Swedish study’ suffered from a wide range of diagnosed mental and physical health conditions. As a group, they were at elevated risk of self-harm, regardless of the presence or absence of gambling disorder.”

The authors of the Swedish study, Karlsson & Håkansson, themselves acknowledged that the results were likely “skewed toward a population” of people that had more “severe forms” of gambling disorders.

A follow-up study by Karlsson and Håkansson in 2020 found that alcohol and drug misuse were additional factors in reported suicide attempts.

Panel members outspoken

In 2022, then-Health Minister Maggie Throup told Parliament the Public Health England report would be reviewed and the calculation used to create the estimates would be published.

This has yet to be made public, if it was even carried out, and the UK government has had an election and government change in the meantime.

One of the members who had advised on the OHID report as a member of its expert panel was Dr Henrietta Bowden-Jones.

Since the work on that panel, Dr Bowden-Jones publicly stated at a Social Market Foundation event in 2022 that you can’t use methodologies from other markets to accurately assess rates of suicide.

“We cannot extrapolate from Swedish studies, from Norwegian studies – it doesn’t work,” Bowden-Jones said.

Tracking the rate of suicide due to one factor is a tough task, as suicide can be hard to identify in some cases, or is the result of combined issues that can run the spectrum of mental and physical health disorders.  

Of the hard data available on the connection between gambling and suicides, there is little in modern statistics in the UK made public by the government.

Data from the UK’s Office for National Statistics reported that the number of suicides where “gamble/gambled or gambling” was mentioned on the death certificate was 21 in England and Wales during the period between 2001 and 2016.

However, the Office for National Statistics does urge caution when interpreting this data. As it noted, the data is not “considered completely reliable” as coroners will not always record detailed information about a deceased person’s history. 

“Therefore, these figures represent how many records mentioned gambling on the death certificate but are likely to be an undercount,” the Office for National Statistics stated in 2018, when the data was published.

Waugh, who has been outspoken on this issue, acknowledges that gambling disorder is a risk factor for suicide.

However, it is “one that demands context. Understanding this can be helpful when it comes to devising self-harm prevention strategies,” Waugh adds.

Future approach

If figures are to be produced that show a prevalence of gambling-related suicides, they should have clear methodologies and operationalised definitions. How long has the person gambled? Have they been diagnosed with a gambling addiction? Were there medical comorbidity factors?

The number may not be clear or agreed upon, but people do die from gambling-related harm and disorders. While a move towards clear data should be of the upmost importance, the pain suffered by families impacted by gambling-related suicides should not be forgotten, such as that felt by Liz and Charles Ritchie from the organisation Gambling with Lives.

The Ritchies lost their son Jack in 2017 and recounted their lived experience for the recent Health and Social Care Committee panel, a recount that should not be diminished in any way by potentially erroneous statistics.