Cynthia Grant is a licensed clinical social worker who helps people with gambling addictions. She shared her insights as prediction markets become more popular.
DENVER — Lying. Being secretive. Losing a substantial amount of money. The hallmarks of gambling addictions are showing up among some people betting on things like the weather, elections and celebrity awards shows in prediction markets.
Prediction market apps like Polymarket and Kalshi have become popular as people put their money toward the outcome of news events. These apps, unlike sports betting apps, are regulated differently. The money put into the systems are characterized as “trades” and “event contracts” as opposed to bets.
Cynthia Grant is the vice president of clinic for Birches Health, which is an online therapy clinic for gambling addiction. She shared what her clinic is experiencing as prediction markets begin to grow in popularity.
Are you seeing people who are getting too deep into the prediction markets?
We are seeing some very early signals of things that we are watching for. One of those is that people are spending a lot of time tracking how they’re doing on the prediction markets. So they’re watching, they’re following, they’re thinking about it more and more. And when that starts to take over parts of a person’s day, or if it goes from something that’s occasional and fun and entertaining to something that really starts to live in your head, that’s when we know that there is something that could potentially be emerging as a problem.
Men are more likely to gamble in general because they have much higher exposure. It’s culturally acceptable. Sports betting in particular is very heavily marketed toward men. We often see that this is very much part of how it’s normalized, of being a fan or being a trader or being somebody who’s interested in finances and investments. And so as a result of that, you have a lot of different characteristics of these platforms that are really drawing men in, especially young men.
What makes these prediction markets very similar to gambling?
Whether it’s called a bet, a contract, a market, the question is whether it encourages those same harmful patterns that we see in sports gambling. So things like compulsion, chasing losses, secrecy, financial harm, anxiety and the strain that it really causes on families. When you start to see some of those same patterns, and again from our perspective, there is a very real difference in how these products are defined and regulated, but in the therapy room, we often see the exact same cycle of that anticipation, action and reaction. It just plays out again and again.
What I find interesting about this type of addiction compared to other addictions, like substance abuse, is you’re not actually putting something into your body. Is there a difference here?
Gambling disorder is classified as an Addiction Disorder. So in our manual that we use to be able to come up with diagnosis, it is labeled as an addiction. But you’re right. It is an addiction that doesn’t involve, you know, something that is physically being put into your body.
There are things like tolerance — so the need to gamble with increasing amounts of money to be able to get the same result.
There’s also evidence that people who are developing behavioral addictions, specifically in regard to gambling, will have withdrawal and irritability when they try to cut back or stop gambling.
What kind of damage are you seeing in people’s lives when gambling addiction is a problem?
People get distracted, their productivity goes down, you start to see absenteeism. So this is a problem that definitely affects more than just the individual, and oftentimes, one of the hallmark characteristics that we see with someone who’s gambling is lying and secrecy. That creates tremendous strain on family members and loved ones.
What can people do or say if they feel their loved one is in a bad cycle?
Family members who want to talk to an individual who they have concerns about need to do this in a very non-judgmental, non-blaming way. It’s really important not to confront but to be able to ask curious questions.
We encourage families to ask “I’ve noticed that you seem to be spending a lot of time on your phone. Is there something going on there? It looks like you’re not sleeping very well. I’ve noticed that your mood is going up and down. What do you think might be causing that?”
It is important to be able to approach this both honestly but also not in a confrontational way. The confrontation does not work.
What message would you give to someone who says “I’m investing here, I’m not gambling?”
When people think that they’re investing but those investments are having negative impacts on their life and their ability to function in the world, this is no longer something that you can control. So I would consider that to be a cognitive distortion in terms of having a belief that you can outsmart it, or that you can control something, when in reality it is controlling you.