I can understand why your inability to control your gambling might make you feel suicidal. Where gambling has brought you is, as I recall from my own experience, a truly lonely place – death can seem attractive compared to some of the other options ahead of you such as continuing to gamble and risking jail or the asylum.
You could also treat this journey as resulting from the gift of desperation. It’s doubtful whether you would be here seeking advice if you weren’t truly desperate. It’s my own personal experience that people like you and I need to experience absolute desperation before we can take any action to try to stop the process of total disintegration that accompanies compulsive gambling.
Please get to one of the various support groups that exist to help compulsive gamblers. I used Gamblers Anonymous and it’s a simple matter of walking in – no paperwork needed. You can find where your nearest meeting is online or by phoning their help line. Just go as an act if faith and of belief in yourself. Go with an open mind and the belief that you are worth a few hours of this support.
I found it a huge relief to meet my fellow travellers who understood what it is like to blow all your money, to steal from others, to borrow without any intention of repaying, to switch off from life in order to gamble. These guys talked about it including the guy who talked about his self-loathing about ‘taking’ money from his dead mother’s purse while she lay dead in her bed. As a class of people there is little we compulsive gamblers won’t stoop to in order to fund our addiction.
On the bright side, some sixteen years since my last gamble, I completed a two year employment contract today and got a two month completion bonus, a fresh two year contract starting from next month with a signing on bonus and a range of great benefits – return flights to the UK for my wife and two kids that I never had when I first showed at GA, health insurance, free schooling etc. My new boss told me she liked my ‘can do’ attitude!
I say this to assure you that there is hope for you and that I know of one certainty: your life will not get any worse if you don’t gamble.
You are not alone. Get to that meeting!