Signs of a gambling problem

The nine, in plain words

The nine below are our own short wording of the criteria the American Psychiatric Association lists for gambling disorder in the fifth edition of its diagnostic manual. Its text is copyrighted and is not reproduced here or anywhere on this site; what follows is written to be recognised rather than scored.

1. It is always on your mind. Replaying the last one, planning the next, working out where the money comes from, on a Tuesday afternoon in a meeting rather than while you are betting.
2. The stakes have to keep rising. What used to give you something now gives you nothing at the same size, so the size goes up. This is the sign people notice last in themselves and first in somebody else.
3. Stopping does not stick. Not one failed attempt, which is ordinary, but a pattern of deciding and then not, until the deciding is part of the routine.
4. You are restless or irritable when you try to stop. A day off is uncomfortable in a way that is out of proportion to what you gave up.
5. You bet to feel better. The trigger is a mood rather than a match: low, guilty, anxious, bored at midnight. The betting is doing a job that has nothing to do with the outcome.
6. You go back to get even. A loss is not the end of the session, it is the reason for the next one, and it is the sign most closely tied to how much is eventually lost.
7. You hide how much. Rounding down, moving the conversation on, deleting the app before somebody picks up your phone. Concealment is a sign in its own right, separately from the amount concealed.
8. It has cost you something real. A relationship, a job, a place on a course, an opportunity you let go rather than explain. What gambling took or put at risk, not what you fear it might.
9. You have needed somebody to bail you out. Borrowing, selling, or asking family for money to get out of a hole gambling dug.

Where the line for a diagnosis falls, and who draws it

Four or more of those nine inside a twelve month period, causing real impairment or distress. Three things about that threshold matter more than the number.

It is a threshold inside a diagnosis, not a score you give yourself. Each criterion's wording does work a short paraphrase cannot: what counts as preoccupation, as unsuccessful, as significant. A clinician asks follow up questions. A page cannot.

Below four is not nothing. The manual describes a disorder, not the only shape gambling harm takes. People lose houses at two criteria. If two of the nine are true of your last year, that is worth acting on whatever a threshold says.

Nine criteria is one publisher's answer. Others exist and disagree at the edges: the nine scored items of the Canadian Problem Gambling Index, Ferris and Wynne, 2001, ask about money, guilt, criticism, health and household finances rather than only behaviour, and sort people into bands rather than draw a line. Those screens, and why this site describes them rather than printing them, are on the check page.

Which ones tend to show up first

Ask them in the order a life actually breaks and the list reads differently. Concealment and chasing arrive early, because both are cheap: nobody has to be told and nothing has to change. The mood trigger comes with them and is hardest to see from inside, because in the moment it looks like a decision. Rising stakes and failed stopping come next. The cost to a relationship or a job, and the bailout, arrive last and are what other people see first, which is why somebody outside often notices before the person betting does.

What they look like on a phone

Almost none of this looks like a casino. Preoccupation is a home screen you check on the way to something else. Chasing is a live market still open when the game you lost on has finished. Concealment is trivial because there is nothing to conceal: no slip, no receipt, no trip out, and an app you delete in two seconds and reinstall in ten.

That last one is the mechanism most advice about willpower ignores. The gap between the urge and the bet used to be a walk, and a phone removes it, which is what a device layer is for: it puts one back. What that layer can and cannot do is at when quitting did not stick, and what a wait is for at what a cool down is for.

What other organisations call a warning sign

The clinical criteria are not the only vocabulary. The National Council on Problem Gambling describes problem gambling as gambling behaviour that is damaging to a person or their family, and names as warning signs thinking about gambling all the time, needing to bet more money and more often, and going back to try to win money back. It estimates that 2.5 million adults in the United States, about one percent, meet the criteria for a severe gambling problem in a given year, read from its own page on 3 September 2026.

The two are not in conflict. The clinical vocabulary decides whether somebody has a disorder; the plainer one exists so a person who does not, or does not yet, still recognises themselves. A page carrying only the first would be telling a lot of people in trouble that they do not qualify.

What to do with a sign you recognised

Say it to somebody. That is the whole of the advice and it is not a platitude: every service below is free, open around the clock, not run by us, and used mostly by people who are not sure whether they have a problem. If you would rather start with a questionnaire, the published ones and where to take them are on the check page. If you are reading this about somebody else, what you can do from outside their phone is at the page for the person beside them.