After almost 24 years in the Army, Rachel described her career as the “most amazing part” of her life, but admitted it affected her mental health.<\/p>\n
“I think it took its toll on me… just all the things that maybe I’ve endured my whole life, you know, within the Army.<\/p>\n
“You kind of like pretend that there’s nothing wrong with you when you just crack on. But inside, there is so much going on.”<\/p>\n
Rachel described her mental health as being a “sliding scale” throughout her life, as she received support through the Army via therapy and medication.<\/p>\n
The Ministry of Defence said it took problem gambling seriously and recognised the “significant impact” it could have on the health and wellbeing of service personnel.<\/p>\n
It said it had a “comprehensive gambling clinical pathway”, including assessment, support and referral to specialist NHS services, as well as welfare and pastoral support.<\/p>\n
Despite this, Rachel said she found herself increasingly turning to gambling sites and hobbies during Covid because she “wasn’t happy at all”.<\/p>\n
She said a lot of her addiction was easy to hide through online betting apps on her mobile.<\/p>\n
“We’re always on our phones”, she said, adding that if she was ever asked, she would say she was texting when she was “putting money into the bingo sites”.<\/p>\n
“I made sure I hid it from everybody… that’s how I knew it was wrong because I was hiding it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After almost 24 years in the Army, Rachel described her career as the “most amazing part” of her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":351417,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[134,554,555,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-351416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-health","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351416\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/351417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}