According to the latest Connecticut Economic and Social Impact Study, ninety-one percent of adults and 68% of youth participate in some form of gambling each year. Whether it is playing the lottery, scratch tickets, sports betting, bingo, poker, or community raffle drawings, the chances are that if it’s not you, it’s someone you know. Although currently only 1-2% of residents in our State are diagnosed with a clinical gambling disorder, over 5% are moderately to severely at-risk. While those might not sound like huge numbers, it is actually 155,512 people living right here in our communities. Gambling as a form of entertainment can quickly turn from a fun activity to a life-altering problem.
Through prevention efforts, early intervention, access to treatment and by working together, we can stop the problem before it starts and get those needing help into recovery. Here in Connecticut, we have five Regional Gambling Awareness Teams that bring together professionals from the prevention, treatment and recovery communities as well as local community members to make gambling supportive efforts a priority through a coalition structure.
These teams meet on a quarterly basis to:
- Share resources
- Collect data
- Assess community readiness to address problem gambling
- Create gambling-informed programs and services
- Raise gambling awareness across the lifespan and the continuum of care
We hope you will find this website to be a useful resource to stay up to date with gambling prevention, treatment and recovery efforts in Connecticut. Please contact us for more information and we encourage you to get involved!
