Independent help, and how to use it

Independent organisations

Each of these is run separately from any gambling business. You can approach them directly and you do not need to tell us, or anyone else, that you have.

GamCare

Free information, advice and support for anyone affected by gambling — including one-to-one treatment and a forum for people who prefer to read before they speak. Their site lists the ways to reach them, including live chat.

BeGambleAware

A starting point if you are not yet sure what you need: self-assessment tools, plain explanations of how gambling products are designed, and routes into free treatment.

GAMSTOP

A free self-exclusion scheme operated independently of gambling businesses. You sign up directly with them, choose a period, and it applies across the participating sites at once rather than one at a time.

Gambling Therapy

Online support available in a range of languages, with moderated groups and one-to-one help. Useful if English is not the language you would rather talk about this in.

These links open external sites run by other organisations. They are listed here because they are independent of this site, not because they are connected to it.

Questions worth asking yourself

Nobody else can answer these, and there is no score at the end. They are simply the questions that tend to be honest.

• Have you gambled with money set aside for something else — rent, a bill, food, someone else’s money?
• Have you gone back the same day to win back what you lost?
• Do you play for longer than you meant to, most times?
• Have you been vague with anyone about how much you play or how much you have lost?
• Have you borrowed, sold something, or used credit to keep playing?
• Does the thought of stopping for a month feel like relief, or like a problem to be solved?
• Has anyone close to you said something about it more than once?
• Do you play to change how you feel, rather than because you want to play?

If several of these landed, that is worth taking seriously rather than filing away. The organisations above talk to people at exactly that stage every day, long before anything has fallen apart.

Steps you can take today

None of these require permission, an approval, or a conversation with us.

• Turn on a gambling block at your bank. Many banks offer one in the app, and many build in a delay before it can be switched off again — the delay is the useful part.
• Install blocking software on your devices. Device-level or network-level blocking covers every site at once, including ones you have not found yet.
• Delete saved payment methods. Remove stored cards from accounts and from the browser’s autofill. Friction at the right moment is worth more than willpower.
• Turn off marketing messages. Contact preferences are a setting; unsubscribing from promotional mail removes a prompt you did not choose to receive.
• Hand over the money. Asking someone you trust to hold a card, or moving money to an account you cannot reach quickly, is a plain and effective step.
• Tell one person. Saying it out loud once, to anyone, is the step people describe afterwards as the one that mattered.

Controls on the account itself

Alongside the independent options, deposit limits, session reminders, time-outs and self-exclusion can be applied to the account. What each one is, and what to establish before choosing between them, is on the account controls page. Combining an account-level control with an independent block is stronger than either alone, because they fail in different ways.

Worried about someone else

Every organisation listed above also supports families, partners and friends, and you do not need the other person’s agreement — or their knowledge — to talk to them. Advice for that situation is different from advice for the person gambling, which is why it is worth asking for it directly rather than improvising.

Practical steps for someone in that position usually include protecting shared money first, understanding what you can and cannot control, and getting support for yourself rather than only for them.