Mental Health Awareness Month: How Financial Strain from Gambling Impacts Mental Health

Mental Health Awareness Month is an important reminder that financial stress and strain can dramatically impact emotional well-being. Financial health and mental health are linked together, but in my clinical experience, financial stress from gambling is often hidden or not detected until the consequences become severe.

Financial strain does not always look dramatic at first. It may appear as missed bills, drained savings, secrecy around spending, or a growing sense of pressure around money. Some do not even recognize it as a warning sign of problem gambling because financial stress has become so normalized that they see it as a part of everyday life.

Yet financial stress rarely stays confined to finances. It spills into mental health, and it can affect sleep, concentration, mood, relationships, and a person’s sense of control. Over time, that pressure can intensify feelings of anxiety and depression. It can also create a reinforcing cycle: emotional distress drives more gambling, and gambling-related consequences deepen the distress.

One of the crucial turning points is when gambling stops being entertainment and starts to feel like a solution. Gambling is supposed to make life more fun, not create more suffering. When someone begins to see gambling as a way to solve money problems or escape emotional discomfort, the risk of developing problem gambling increases significantly.

One of the biggest challenges is that this kind of suffering is not always visible from the outside. A person may appear to be living a normal life, but internally, they could be experiencing obsessional thinking, guilt, shame, sleep disruption, and a growing sense that things are getting out of control. That is one reason gambling-related harm can go unrecognized for so long. By the time someone asks for help, harm may have already become the norm.

When gambling begins to show up through financial strain, secrecy, guilt, or emotional suffering, it may be a sign that something more serious is developing. Those early shifts can point to a growing mental health toll long before a person reaches a crisis point. Asking better questions earlier can make a real difference: Is gambling still fun, or does it feel like a necessity? Is it affecting sleep, mood, or relationships? Is it becoming harder to control?

Early recognition is central to the work of the Financial Stability and Responsible Gambling (FSRG) Initiative. Through FSRG, we are helping advance a more prevention-oriented conversation that addresses gambling-related harm as both a financial and mental health issue. The initiative’s focus on earlier signs of stress and harm helps advance more informed, connected approaches to prevention before distress escalates into crisis.

Mental Health Awareness Month is an opportunity to look more closely at how distress builds over time. Recognizing the connection between financial strain, emotional suffering, and gambling-related harm is an important part of prevention and a necessary step toward the kind of earlier, more supportive response that FSRG is working to advance.

Dr. Timothy Fong, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA and Co-Director of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program

Dr. Fong is a Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. He completed his undergraduate and medical training at Northwestern University and his psychiatry residency at UCLA, followed by an addiction psychiatry fellowship at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. He co-directs the UCLA Gambling Studies Program, which focuses on understanding and treating gambling disorder. He also directs the UCLA Addiction Psychiatry Fellowship and is a founding member of the UCLA Cannabis Research Initiative.