Gambling Addiction Starts in Middle School

Shawn Kelly is a pediatrician in Ottawa who specializes in adolescent addiction medicine. Because he’s one of the few doing this work in his part of Canada, teenagers come to him with a host of problem behaviors, from opioid abuse to compulsive video gaming. A few years ago, patients started coming to him with gambling issues. Sometimes these issues were comorbidities with drug addiction. But now, he’s seeing gambling in his general pediatrics practice, too, and among younger teens without other issues.

A parent will say at the end of a pediatric well visit, “Are you going to tell Dr. Kelly what you did?” And it turns out the tween surreptitiously took his dad’s credit card and blew over a thousand Canadian dollars in one weekend on sports betting and online casinos. As these incidents became more common in his practice, Kelly........

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