ABSTRACT
A full public health approach to gambling should include gambling’s “harm to others”, the most obvious example of which is the effects of excessive gambling on close family members. This chapter will outline a framework for understanding the experience of family members who are affected by their relatives’ excessive gambling, viewing that experience as one characterised by multiple stressors and threats to individual adult and child and whole family security and health, dilemmas about how to cope and problematic and fragile support from personal and professional sources. The chapter will then summarise research, both qualitative and quantitative, from a number of countries, that has deepened our understanding of that experience. It will be concluded that the effects of excessive gambling on family members represent a serious health burden, which should be much more central to the gambling research agenda and gambling policy debates than is presently the case.
