My name's Bill, I work in the construction industry. I have a lot of hobbies like gardening, DIY, relaxing in front of the TV, watching DVD's or listening to music. I grew up in the 70's so went though the era of Pink Floyd, Skyhooks, Beatles all of those things but I think Bowie is the one that stuck with me over the years. I like cooking as well, I'll often come home and cook something elaborate. I also mentor a young child on Saturdays, which keeps me busy on Saturday mornings.

An average day at work I suppose would be answering emails of which I get probably 50 or 60  a day that are mostly budget related and going through and working out what the important ones are and dealing with peoples issues for them in relation to budgets.

Gambling for me started when I went with a group of people to the casino which was in the old casino in Melbourne, newly opened. I'd actually been into poker machine venues before that and was never interested, never put any money into them, but went into the casino and the atmosphere and the people and the feeling was what dragged me in. Going back a few times it became a habit of going in there every Saturday night and then it went to Friday night as well as Saturday and it just went from there. If you're in a bit of a negative frame of mind to go into something like that where there's all of these positives, supposedly all of these positives, it's a really good feeling. It wasn't until that point in the casino that I actually started playing them and thought “this is fun”.

The trap from my point of view was the first win I had which was $500 in the casino, initially I'd just been winning small amounts or losing, constantly losing and to get that win I was trapped, I was hooked. It wasn't until later on that I actually started realising how much I was losing and how much I wasting on the machines.

When my father passed away I was only very young. I was six. It really influenced my life. From the time when he died it influenced my life. I was always very, very negative, I was always relatively depressed, I always felt very, very lonely because I'd been abandoned basically. I had that feeling of being abandoned constantly. And that feeling of abandonment actually started going into the relationships that I was getting involved in so I was never really fully committed because I thought they were going to disappear. Initially, when I moved six years ago, I was not only moving for work, but was also trying to escape a relationship that wasn't working. It wasn't argumentative or violent or anything just was nonexistent, just two people had got together who weren't suited to each other and the relationship was going nowhere and I was looking for avenues to fill that void and gambling became one of those avenues.

To get hooked on poker machines I think for me happened very, very quickly. Initially you'd have one machine that was your favourite and if someone was on it you'd go to your second favourite and third favourite and so on. You wouldn't leave the machine, if you had to leave the machine for any reason you'd reserve it. The amount that I'd spend each time would be anything up to $600 at a time and that could be several times a week. Constantly you'd think “oh it's gotta win within the next hour or so”. To have a big win, look, I played the poker machines for 5, 6 years, actually no it'd be more than that, it'd be 10 years, and I could count the amount of large wins on one hand.

I was frequently in denial, if someone said to me that I had a problem with gambling I'd completely avoid it. You got the point where you didn't even realise that you were lying. Someone would say at work “where were you, you were supposed to be doing such and such” and you'd just lie outright. It got to the point where I was using my credit card and going and getting cash on the credit card so that it wasn't showing up on the joint credit card that I was spending the amount of money that I was. I would not eat properly because it was more important to gamble than to eat. I couldn't concentrate for more than about an hour at work before I started thinking about gambling. I'd become a recluse, I didn't see people, I didn't talk to people, I didn't like being at work talking to people, I didn't like answering the phone. That's pretty severe depression. You can't tell someone to stop, they've got to want to do it themselves, and it took me a while to get to that point.

The moment that finally made me do something about it, do something about the gambling issue was when I had a $13,000 dollar credit card debt, when I had no food in the house, when I had a whole pile of bills sitting on the bench to pay and I couldn't pay them, not even with a credit card and my bank balance, my savings account bank balance was zero. I had to do something. If I had have gone on any longer I can't imagine what would have happened, I don't want to imagine what would have happened, because it was pretty bad.

I initially found the number for Gambler's Help, I think it was actually in one of the poker machine venues, the fear of actually going in there in the first place was the hardest part of it. I look back on it now and say “I'm glad I went and got help, I needed to get help, I could not have done it myself”, so someone had to help me work through this. It turned out that the person who I was seeing was very experienced and very supportive and helped me deal through the issues, I wouldn't say quickly, but we worked through things in a systematic and very effective manner.

Not gambling has improved my life substantially. Not only do I have money now and I can go out and buy, well, food for a start that I couldn't do before, I've got involved in the community, I've created a lot of friends, I've done that mainly through the men's support group that I've been going to and it's just been very, very positive. My self esteem's lifted substantially, so I now feel a lot better about life and work and living.

If what I've said, you can relate too then go and do something about it, don't, don't sit there and feel sorry for yourself, you've got to actually work through it. You're in control of it, no one else.

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