Like Abbie, Kiki would also gamble on her phone, often for more than 24 hours until she ran out of money.<\/p>\n
The 40-year-old said her gambling addiction made her feel suicidal.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t care whether I lived or died. It was like a slow and painful death,” Kiki told the BBC.<\/p>\n
“I used to pray to die and just think ‘I can’t wait for this to be over’.<\/p>\n
“Your mindset was just to do anything that you needed to do to still enable you to gamble.<\/p>\n
“I was going without food shopping, I didn’t have gas, the only reason why I had electric and wi-fi is because I needed that to gamble.”<\/p>\n
Kiki noticed her gambling habit became worse during the week before her period.<\/p>\n
“Impulsivity and compulsive behaviours are more likely to shine bright in the week before my period – and that’s when I’d make even worse decisions around that week,” said Kiki from Woolwich in south-east London. <\/p>\n
“I think there is a big connection between poor decision-making and impulsive behaviour during your menstrual cycle.”<\/p>\n
Kiki said she reached her “catastrophic point and rock bottom” when she stole a considerable amount of money from her former partner’s bank account to gamble with.<\/p>\n
“I wrote letters to the train driver, to the passengers, and apologised for the trauma that I was about to cause them by ending my life at the train station,” she said.<\/p>\n
Instead, Kiki called the GamCare National Helpline – an organisation that provides free support for anyone affected by gambling harms.<\/p>\n
“I knew that my death would have caused more trauma on other people and I just couldn’t do it,” she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Like Abbie, Kiki would also gamble on her phone, often for more than 24 hours until she ran…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":398627,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[64,63,137,514,515],"class_list":{"0":"post-398626","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-mental-health","12":"tag-mentalhealth"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398626\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/398627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}