Britain's new addicts: women who gamble online, at home and in secret

When Kath dropped her two boys off at their primary school, she had the day to herself. But the school day was not long enough and it was when she arrived late to pick them up for the third day in a row, for the third week in a row, that the crunch came.

"The teacher called me in and said my youngest son was starting to get panicky around home time and that he had been crying when I was late. She was asking if there were any problems at home and I just felt irritated by her; I felt that she was interfering," she said. "Then I got home and all the anger turned to embarrassment, it all flooded over me and I was shaking and crying. It was like an emotional cold turkey, but it was still a while before I got to the point when I rang the Samaritans."

Suicidal thoughts are not uncommon in women with addictions, but Kath's was not drink or drugs, but gambling. She spent the day playing online poker. One of the fast-growing group of women turning to what has in the past been a man's game, Kath was lonely with her husband working long hours running his own business in Leeds and first tried online poker when she was "feeling old and fed up". Within a fortnight she had lost £1,700 and within a year had five-­figure credit card debts that she still hasn't told her husband about. "It's very numbing, you really get lost and don't snap out of it. It feels like you're on medication. Now that I'm getting counselling, it feels as if I've woken up."

But Kath is unusual. Even as online gambling is becoming hugely popular with women who would not dream of walking into a betting shop or going alone to a casino, the numbers of women coming forward for help is not keeping pace. The situation has led Dr Henrietta Bowden-Jones, consultant psychiatrist at the National Problem Gambling Clinic in London's Soho, the only such NHS unit, to launch a child-minding service this month in an attempt to encourage more women to seek help.

"We know there is a significant impact on children of gamblers and it's difficult for women with children to get to a clinic," said Bowden-Jones. "So we hoped offering this service might bring more women out of the isolation, the shame and the guilt that they might be enduring alone, hidden away at home.

"The women we see are across the social spectrum, low income to high income. Losing £1,000 for one woman is equal to losing £100,000 for another. Often you are addressing people who are quite hurt and damaged and are self-medicating with gambling."

Natasha Dow Schull, a cultural anthropologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has written a book on compulsive gambling, to be publishedthis year. She says the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling – slot and video poker machines – pulls players into a trance-like state, the "machine zone", in which daily worries fade away. But it's different for men and women – men gamble for a cocaine-like rush, women for a methadone-like numbness.

"This isn't like buying shoes," she said. "These are potent and powerful devices effective in shifting your inner mood and state." Her research found several incidents of women neglecting children while they gambled, including cases of babies left to die in over-heated cars parked outside casinos.

The Gambling Commission estimates that there are between 236,000 and 378,000 problem gamblers in Britain, but Gamblers Anonymous thinks it is nearer 600,000. A GA spokesman said: "Recovery from a gambling addiction is as difficult as you want to make it. You have to want to get better and that's the same if you are male or female. We don't differentiate, we never say no to anyone who wants to recover."

Evidence indicates that the number of women with problems has doubled in recent years, and they now make up a quarter of addicts, although when it comes to online gambling the proportion is thought to be far higher. The explosion in internet gambling sites attracts more women than the traditionally male-dominated betting shops and casinos.

Charities helping compulsive gamblers report significant increases in women callers, although Ian Semel of Breakeven.org.uk said that their biggest success in getting women to come forward was with an online help site. "Women are 50/50 with the men there; they definitely feel safer looking for help online than ringing on the phone line. The numbers are far higher than anyone admits, not helped by the fact that it is the gambling industry that provides most of the money for the help groups. It's not great that reading a message about how to deal with your addiction links back to a gambling website."

The British Medical Association wants gambling to be a recognised addiction in the NHS, and the money the gambling industry, through the Responsibility in Gambling Trust, pays into treatment programmes – £3.6m in 2007 – raised to at least £10m annually.

Addiction counsellor Liz Karter, who works with the charity GamCare and helped set up some of the first help groups for women compulsive gamblers, thinks it is still too early to see women coming forward with online gambling issues: "When it comes to women, we often see gambling as a symptom of someone's underlying emotional distress," she said.

"You do see from time to time a woman coming forward who is using gambling as a means of escape from the stresses that modern life puts on her, the demands of a job, children, her partner, her financial responsibilities. Gambling isn't like alcohol, where you can't hide being drunk and you can't look after the kids. But more often I see women who have had some traumatic experience, like an abusive relationship and they feel quite bad about themselves so they shut everything out by gambling. You hear them say 'I'm in a bubble, I'm in a trance'.

"Most of the women I have been seeing are fruit machine players; we're just beginning to see the online players coming forward. But often it's not until women are in complete financial desperation that they'll finally look for help and that can be 10 years down the line."

Casino and poker websites are attracting women with "female-friendly" gimmicks – including Barbie pink colour schemes, "hunk of the month" pin-ups and gambling horoscopes.

There are an estimated 2,000 gambling websites, and more are exploiting the fact that women feel safer playing online. The age profile for female online gamblers is 25 to 34, according to a Gambling Commission survey. Cashcade, which runs getmintedbingo.com, says it has an 80% female audience. Gambling sites say they have safeguards to protect against addiction. "We have daily, weekly and monthly limits to prohibit huge spending," said a Cashcade spokesman.

Bowden-Jones said some women were playing up to 10 hours a day online. "Women are playing online when their partners are at work, then shut down the web when their husbands come home. It's made easy for you as long as you have a credit card.

"There are sites that are targeting women. But the children are placed in front of the TV so the children are not getting the emotional nurturing."

American author Marilyn Lancelot first visited a casino in 1984, aged 53. She describes herself as a "recovering compulsive gambler". Her betting led to her embezzling her employer and serving two years in jail. "I lost my job, home, life savings, my retirement and my freedom," she said. She is still paying back the money and writing help books. She helped set up one of the few internet support newsletters and forums specifically dedicated to women.

"Women have taken second place in most areas for many years and are just beginning to make a mark with the gambling addiction," she said.

"Ten years ago there were a handful of women gambling and the few who sought out treatment were chased away by the men, either humiliated or hit on. That has changed with more women earning an income, raising families without a spouse, freedom to enter gambling establishments without an escort, and thus creating more female gamblers.

"Men usually gamble because they have large egos and are seeking power from winning in competitive games such as cards, whereas the women have low self-esteem and feel a sense of empowerment when they gamble."

For women like Kath, the road to recovery is difficult when temptation is there every time they use a computer. "It did occur to me to get rid of the wi-fi," said Kath, "but then my husband would want to know why."