BY ALICIA DUNKLEY Observer senior reporter dunkleya@jamaicaobserver.com
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
HOUSEWIVES have joined the list of persons seriously hooked on gambling in Jamaica.
According to executive director of RISE Life Management Services, Sonita Morin-Abrahams, these women, mostly hailing from the upper echelons of society, have been joining their male counterparts at the gaming tables for high stakes.
Richard Henry, RISE Life Management Services' co-ordinator, counselling services, speaking at yesterday's Observer Monday Exchange. (Photo: Naphtali Junior)
Shawn McGregor, RISE Life Management programme manager, makes a point at at yesterday’s Observer Monday Exchange.
"There are a lot of women who are perhaps housewives and not working; they might be foreigners living in Jamaica and their husbands are here on contract and they are in the gambling houses on a daily basis and at nights," Morin-Abrahams told Observer editors and reporters at the weekly Monday Exchange meeting at the newspaper's head office in Kingston yesterday.
"We have tried to introduce a programme in the gaming lounges where when they (staff) recognise that there is a serious problem in clients some amount of intervention can be done," Morin-Abrahams revealed
She said in most cases the issue was kept a "secret", especially if the women are from affluent backgrounds, while in other instances it would be another concerned family member who would seek help on their behalf.
"A lot of persons don't understand what a serious addiction gambling can be and that you can get to the point where you gamble away your house, your car, and your entire income and the denial associated with addiction is so strong that that person is not going to come forward and say 'I have a problem' and come in," she noted.
The RISE Life executive director said at the top of the list of addictions in Jamaica was ganja use, followed by alcohol, gambling, tobacco and cocaine use.
RISE's co-ordinator, counselling services, Richard Henry, used the Monday Exchange to call for a study on gambling among adults in the island. The call comes three years after the only study on Child and Adolescent Gambling in Jamaica was done.
"We need to do a study on gambling among adults in Jamaica. Per year we work with maybe 150 adults (with gambling addiction)," said Henry. "The difficulty with knowing what is the rate of pathological gambling among adults is that we need to do a study. We have been trying to get that done because as the industry advances and we find out we have problems with gambling we have no baseline to go back to understand what it is that created all this problem. We need a baseline study now."
