Podcast
Ep. 30 Transcript: Problem Gambling Peer Support with Don McCourtney
About the Episode
Date: January 19, 2024
Episode 30: Problem Gambling Peer Support with Don McCourtney
Transcript
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Welcome, everybody, to another edition of Peer Into Recovery podcast. I’m your host, Chris Newcomb. Today, we have a great guest. His name is Dr. Don McCourtney. He holds a PhD in psychology from the University of Nebraska. He also has an MBA from an online school in California. He is a registered peer recovery specialist, as well as certified older adult peer specialist, and also a certified problem gambler counselor. He is the lead problem gambling recovery services coordinator at the Office of Recovery Services through Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services, also known as DBHDS. We are glad to have him here. Don, how are you doing today?
DON MCCOURTNEY: I’m doing great, Chris. I appreciate being here. Thank you for asking to be involved.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: You’re welcome. We’re glad to have you. I’ve been looking forward to this interview. Why don’t we get right into it. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your story of origin with recovery, how you got into peer services for yourself and recovery, and then we’ll segue into what you’re doing now at DBHDS as the lead problem gambling recovery services coordinator.
DON MCCOURTNEY: Great. Thank you. Actually, I’m always say I’m very fortunate. I’m a person in long-term recovery. I have 49 years of not using my drug of choice, alcohol or any other mood-altering substance.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Wow. We got to pause for a second on that one. Forty-nine years. That is amazing. That is really awesome. Congratulations on that.
DON MCCOURTNEY: Thank you. Actually, I became addicted to alcohol when I was 15 and a half years of age, and was well into my addiction long before I left high school. The joke in the family at the time was I going to be able to graduate or not. That was in 1971. Nobody believed that people my age at the time, 17 years of age, could be addicted to alcohol. Well, of course, we know now it’s not true. But by the time I was 21 years of age, I had received three drink and driving charges in a six-month period, number of public intoxications, totaled out two different automobiles, insurance was sky-high, spent numerous times in jail for public intoxication, and then of course, rather long-length is in jail 30 days, if you will, for my last drunken driving charge. I was fortunate. My father was in a little farm community in Nebraska, and my father had stole chickens with the judge when they were kids. Instead of throwing me in prison, which he could have by the law of the state of Nebraska, he gave me an opportunity to go seek treatment.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: That’s amazing. Here we are now, 49 years later. Wow, what a transformation.
DON MCCOURTNEY: Yeah. Again, I believe I’m very fortunate, and my pathway of recovery is the 12 steps, and my higher power has been very kind to me in allowing me to achieve what I’ve achieved in my life. That’s why I go by Don instead of doctor, because that’s something I achieved. It’s not who I am. I jokingly say, well, my PhD, my MBA, that and $10 somewhere will get you a cup of coffee. I’ve done any number of things in the field of addiction. I started working in the field of addiction in 1977. I sobered up August 20th of 1974. I always say at my age now, I’m older than most people that I work with, that they’ve been alive. I was fortunate that I was able to get my training for my alcohol and drug training at Hazelton, now called Hazelton Betty Ford, and I spent a year there in their alcohol, drug training program, and then went from there and got a bachelor’s degree, and then went and got a master’s and a PhD, and then an MBA for all the wrong reasons I might add, at least in the end.
I go by Don because my PhD and my MBA, and $10 will get you a cup of coffee somewhere. I got the education at the time seemed like the right reason, but looking back, it wasn’t the right reason. I’ve been fortunate. I’ve been a clinician. I ran treatment facilities as CEO. I’ve been involved in corporate, in developing, in implementing programs. I’ve been very fortunate to work in the field of addiction in my entire career. I got the PhD because as an administrator, I had to do with managed care company. Managed care company, they weren’t even knowing until sometime in, for me anyway, I was working as an administrator in Northern Iowa. And my first experience with managed care was a position in a nurse came in, and they discharged two-thirds of my population. But because they said no more insurance. And that was the end of it. And so I had 30 patients and two-thirds of them couldn’t afford to be there, so they left.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: That was probably a rough day at work.
DON MCCOURTNEY: It was terrible. I call it, best I could ever call it, it happened on a Tuesday. They just disenfranchised, if you will, 10. And then on Wednesday, they disenfranchised the other 10 and left us with 10 people. I called it a terrible Tuesday and an awful Wednesday because it was a nightmare. And we had patients and families, everybody was off. So I got the PhD so I could argue, if you will, or defend people that was in the facility so we could make sure clinically that I could argue effectively with the outside sources, managed care companies. And then I got the MBA so I could effectively argue with corporate people about business. And then I got all that education, it was all said and done, nobody cared.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: You’re like, listen, I went to school, sit down and listen, at least just listen.
DON MCCOURTNEY: You don’t have to agree, you don’t have to argue, you’re going to listen. I was told clearly by one of the managed care people that I dealt with years ago. They asked me if I ever heard of the golden rule. I said yes. And I started to quote, no, no, that’s not the one. We have the gold, we make the rules. Well, I don’t care what your education is, what you tell me, I don’t care what your background is. This is the way it works because we have the money. Do you really? That was back in the probably early 90s when all that came about.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Well, you guys didn’t go to lunch after that, I’m assuming.
DON MCCOURTNEY: Oh no. We didn’t break any bread, I promise you that.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Wow.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Probably not the guy you want to encourage people at the center. Your life’s never going to get better.
DON MCCOURTNEY: Thanks a lot, man.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Captain Hope.
DON MCCOURTNEY: In the NBA, we used to be able to deal with corporate, and then when it got down to having that, well, we just have a different philosophy. Our goal, we want gold and we’re going to get it any way we can, and we don’t care what your idea is. Throughout my career, I’ve worked for some really aggressive companies when it came to not taking care of, as far as I’m concerned, the staff and the people that were fortunate enough to serve, whether we call them clients, patients, or residents depending on where I was at and what time of my career.
But I always was a huge believer that my responsibility was to take care of the staff and the clients or the patients or whatever we were calling them at the time, the people that needed our services. My job was to protect them from corporate. My job was to make sure they got paid. My job was that corporate got paid and that the patients got what they needed, and the staff got what they needed. If corporate didn’t get paid, that wasn’t high on my list.
My high on my list was take care of the staff, get a good solid environment for them, and then they’ll take care of the people that were fortunate enough to serve, and then the bean counters can come in and they can then take care of the beans and count the numbers. And that worked. Never worked like they wanted, meaning wanting more and more and more, but every place they went, it made money. I turned programs around for a whole different variety of reasons and problems over there, turned programs around and made money.
One organization that I worked for, the facility that I ran, made about $2.5 million in the last four or five years I was there. And they took a million off the top, so made $3.5 million. And the second to the last year I was there, I got the CEO of the company and the CFO came to see me. And they said, well, you gave away a million dollars for free care this year. I said, yeah, do that again, we’ll fire you. I said, you gave me $3.5 million or almost four. Do it again, we’ll fire you. We’re not going to argue. Okay. Next year I gave $750,000 away.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: That’s great. Didn’t do a million. Didn’t do a million. Can’t fire me. I can count too.
DON MCCOURTNEY: At that point, what they did is so they could watch me, I always said they, quote unquote, promoted me to corporation, be a corporate person, and I’m not a corporate person. I don’t think that way. I don’t behave that way, and after a couple of years in corporate, we went several ways.
I chuckle, I was fortunate, Mary McCown, who with the ORS is the person that brought my understanding of the peer movement to Virginia, to Becky, and what I’ve talked to her about. When I was, Mary McCown, which most people know is the training and overseas, the training for the peers for the state of Virginia, and well, brought in what the peer movement was for Virginia. She and another lady named Becky. But I was talking to Mary one day, I said, peer movement officially is new.
However, when I was in Minnesota and went to a halfway house or sober living house from Kansas to Minnesota, I went through treatment Kansas, went to Minnesota, the sober living house, and I learned about Wilmer Minnesota State Hospital and that’s where the Minnesota recovery or treatment started at Wilmer State Hospital. And there was Dan Anderson and Gordon Graham and Howard Swift. Dan was PhD, Gordy was a clergy, and Swift was an LCSW. And they were trying to help the people who are addicted alcohol, and they had this revolving door going on. Well, AA came to Wilmer, Minnesota, and they said, let’s see if we can get those people to come in and help, do some meetings. So they did. And then they found that the revolving door wasn’t quite as intense.
And then after a period of time, they hired people that had recovery, that they had contacts with, with an AA community in Wilmer, Minnesota, and put them in as CNAs, which they weren’t CNAs, they were first peers, because their job was to share their experience and support the person in the areas they needed support using their skills that they learned as is, is a, as somebody who got into recovery and maintaining recovery to support that peer to be able to have that same experience. So that was back in 1957, 58. The way I got involved with problem gambling is, I, depends how you look at it, fortunately or unfortunately, worked in Las Vegas, Nevada for 20 years.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: That’ll do it. They have a couple of places there with gambling opportunities. Probably more than one person who shouldn’t be there at three in the morning. I’m just guessing.
DON MCCOURTNEY: On their lunch hour, they go down the local 7-Eleven and do it there.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Oh, wow. Yeah. Well, as you know with addiction, any opportunity is an opportunity until you realize otherwise.
DON MCCOURTNEY: But the deal was there in Vegas, when I got there was 500,000 people. When I left, it was about 2 million and I was in a 20-year period.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Wow.
DON MCCOURTNEY: They were like 13 or 1400 teachers short when I left there to go to Washington State when I went to work for another company. They were opening an elementary school every 30 days. Every 90 days, a middle school, and every six months, a high school. That’s a potential growth. Because the growth is so rapid. It was one of the fastest growing cities, or it’s not the fastest growing cities for years in the United States.
Two reasons. One, because when you got there, there’s plenty of jobs because the casino business kept growing. And then the second thing is, is housing was just dirt cheap. At that time, housing, you could buy a brand new house for $110,000. And compared to other places, it was just cheap. So they’d have teachers that would get hired and they’d come in, male or female, it didn’t matter. They’d come in and they’d get paid $35,000 a year.
And yet if you worked in a casino as a cocktail waitress, you get paid $80,000 a year, $90,000 a year. Or if you want to be a bartender, you can get paid basically the same. So the teachers then would quit teaching, get these other skill sets, keep their license, and then build up this money by these, not these reasonable, cheap homes actually. And then as they are getting older, then they drop out of this casino system and then go back to teaching school. But that would be 5, 10, 15 years down the road for some of that stuff to happen.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Wow, I could do cards for $90,000 a year. I know.
DON MCCOURTNEY: I know I could.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: I absolutely could. I mean, look, it’s black and red and there’s four suits. It’s not that big of a deal. Ace of spades. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen my Ace of Spades shirt on, which I thought was by Hexen, but apparently not.
DON MCCOURTNEY: You see that? I see. It was remarkable. The first, as a young person, I wasn’t very, maybe my mid-30s at the time, young into the environment. I remember the first cocktail waitress I had for that I was to take and help with as a client. I said to her, I said, it’s going to be real hard for you to stay sober as a cocktail waitress at the casinos because you’re throwing all that booze around. Yeah. I said, you might want to look for another job. It might be beneficial to you. She looked at me and she said, when you came in this morning to work, did you see that baby blue corvette out there? She said, that’s brand new. I said, looks new. She said, that’s mine. I made $75,000 last year. How much you make? I made $24,000.
There was no way that we were going to be able to, and so I had to learn other ways to work with individuals when they went back into those kinds of environments to support them, get them into part of the time, not realizing it was peer support. It’s just what you did, or I thought it’s what you should do, is you connected them with people that I may have known in the community, the people that I’d contact the HR. Who do you have in there that is in recovery? Can I get this person introduced to them? So we can develop a support system so they can go back to work, make a living, and still find recovery.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Right. Yeah. I guess that is initially kind of a hard argument when you get the blue corvette, but the blue corvette doesn’t do a lot of good if your liver is failing, so it’s all relative.
DON MCCOURTNEY: It was one of those things I didn’t realize at the time. I just went with what they wanted and tried to develop what I could with what they wanted and set boundaries and say, you know, I can’t help you here because that’s not going to help you. And let me just talk about that. Did that help you in the past? Can you tell me what it did for you so we can talk about how you think that’s going to help you now? And that’s kind of the things that I would do with them. And but you know, I was very interested in problem gambling when I was out there.
Two or three reasons. One, my brother, he came out, spent some time after he got divorced with my wife and kids. And after about three months, I said, hey man, we got to nudge you out a little bit here. You can’t live with us forever. I love you. And I do. I’m very close to him. And come to find out, after many different conversations, he had a problem gambling.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: So he hit right at home.
DON MCCOURTNEY: And so I, and that’s part of the addiction of problem gambling. It’s a hidden addiction. You can’t see it, you can’t hear it. You can’t.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: People generally don’t advertise it. Like, hi, I’m Chris, by the way, I just put three mortgages on my house. I’m walking now because my car’s gone.
DON MCCOURTNEY: Exactly. But somebody will advertise, hey, I drank a fifth last night. Man, I tell you what, it got wild. The fights that I got into, you see this, and they’re all brags. You know, that’s the only thing that a person who has a problem gambling brags is when they win.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Right. I took him 75 grand last night. I was hot. Tonight, I’m going to hit it again. It’s going to be great.
DON MCCOURTNEY: Right. But they may have won 75,000. But how much did they put into the machines or the tables?
CHRIS NEWCOMB: To get that.
DON MCCOURTNEY: To get that. Or take a look at the whole picture of the gambling. They may be down actually $300,000 and they won 75. Over a period of, let’s say a year, they’re down 300 and now they get a big hit at 75. Well, they won money. No, you didn’t. You’re behind.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: You’re still way behind.
DON MCCOURTNEY: Yes.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: But yeah. Yeah.
DON MCCOURTNEY: So I got interested in it when I was out there in part because of my brother, but in part because the people that we would see had problems with gambling as well as substance use disorders and I was lucky it came up. There was a lady out there, very, very nice lady. Unfortunately, she’s deceased now, but who I give a lot of credit for my knowledge on problem gambling. She was a psychiatrist at the local VA there and she was Dr. Renee Nora.
Dr. Nora, she was actually for a while the president of the National Council on Problem Gambling, helped to develop counseling for certification for problem gamblers, counseling out in Nevada. And what a nice lady. I spent two years with her off and on, and mostly on because I would goof things up and she’d come and she’d talk to me, well, this is why you can’t do it and works this way. There’s some differences done between SUD and some nuances that we had to learn and I had to work with the staff to teach.
And we were fortunate, we were able to get a program in the part of a substance use disorder program, and we were able to get one of the unions to pay for problem gambling treatment. But back in those days, nobody paid for it because they didn’t see it as an addiction, they saw it as an obsessive compulsive disorder. So you get pills for that or a disorder that had to do with a impulse control and so they get pills for that. But nothing to do with an addiction. We now know since 2015, I believe, that has been recognized as an addiction. Prior to that, it was whatever everybody saw that.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Am I right when they call it a process addiction? Is that right? Or a behavioral addiction? Like a difference because it’s not a substance? If you’re going to use quote unquote clinical language just for this moment in our talk.
DON MCCOURTNEY: Well, you know, that’s what they do call it, is a process or a behavioral addiction. And you know, when I am fortunate enough to educate the peers on problem gambling, we talk about some of that because the substance use, problem gambling, whether you’re a clinician or a peer, is the same thing. It’s the delivery of the message. It’s what you do with the process, what you do with the individual in front of you. And so, yes, the peers do learn, at least when I’m talking, it’s a process addiction or behavioral addiction. And right now, problem gambling is the only non-substance addiction that the DSM-5 sees as an addiction. There’s one coming I’ve been told and I’ve been reading about, and that’s gaming. And I’m talking about video games.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: I’d heard about that. A lot of the folks are spending a lot of time doing video games. I’ve even read the news where people died playing video games because they played for like four days straight and didn’t eat, and didn’t drink water. I’m like, hello, you can put it on pause.
DON MCCOURTNEY: You can drink water, you keep going, you might still win.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: You and I know when you’re on that trip, you want to keep going. And I worked at a detox center.I learned some of the science behind the addiction, with the nucleus accumbens and the pleasure center of the brain. And I think that’s important stuff for peers to know too, because it informs the story. Like, I was doing X because this place in the brain was doing Y. And of course, the prefrontal cortex behind your forehead that says, don’t do this, it’s a really bad idea, gets overtaken by the other part that I call the eternal teenager. They’re like, this is going to be so much fun, man.
DON MCCOURTNEY: You’re such a killjoy, dude.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: This is going to be great. And you’re like, yeah, this is going to be great. And it’s not enough great. But I think sometimes understanding the science breaks that ethereal addiction, it’s just looming out there. It’s this blob that you can’t specify. Can you speak to that a little bit about the science of? Sure.
DON MCCOURTNEY: Sure. And you’re right. We do talk about the science. I just did a two-day training with 16 peers, and we did talk about the science. And part of that, you alluded to the prefrontal cortex. And what happens is that gambling, gaming, what that does is it, lack of better words, it hijacks the brain. What it does, it increases the dopamines. Those are, we all know, feel-good hormones that the body releases. And what we know is that as the person gambles and they get this euphoric response from the gambling because the dopamines increase, that what happens then other kinds of activities aren’t as pleasurable.
So the brain gets hijacked. And the brain wants that dopamine impact again. And the way that we get it, if a person has a problem with gambling, is they gamble again. And gambling is never about winning. That’s just not true. Because people have a problem with gambling, if it was about winning, then what would happen? Once they win, they quit. So it’s not about winning, it’s about the dopamine, it’s about the energy between the wager and the end result. It’s everything in between. And that’s that dopamine process. And so…
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Absolutely, Chase.
DON MCCOURTNEY: Yes, absolutely. And a part of that… You’re a good student, because some of the stuff you’re talking about, the stuff that I talk about, is when it comes to the brain process, because I talk about it must be good, huh? So what happens…
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Then a cup of coffee, right?
DON MCCOURTNEY: That’s right. So what happens, the prefrontal cortex, that’s where the decision-making occurs. That’s where we start figuring out, okay, this isn’t a good reason. But because it’s hijacked by the dopamine, that goes out the door. And the reasoning drops. Problem gamblers have a thing called a near-wind. They get all but the same pleasure, and that process is when they win if they almost win. Imagine a slot machine and you get a 7 on two ends and whatever in the middle, but not quite the 7. That dopamine level is supposed sky high because it anticipated it was going to hit because it got so close. Now, I’d see it as a miss, but problem gamblers see it as a near-wind. How can it be a win? It can’t be a win. We’re lost. The thinking process has changed as the gambling can continue to grow on and so that dopamine increases. Then pretty soon what happens, there’s so much dopamine receptor sites that have been built because the brain is going to do it as protected cell and the middle brain or the primitive brain starts sending up more signals. No, no, no, no, you know, I want that feeling. I want to feel good. I want to take this risk.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Right.
DON MCCOURTNEY: And the brain, the upper brain going, oh, and pretty soon, if you will, it caves.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: It just gives in.
DON MCCOURTNEY: It gives in. And then what has to happen is that we have to develop different pathways of pleasure so we don’t have to have that dopamine pleasure pathway to the extreme that we have when people are problem gambling. And that takes some time and a lot of hard work. But the effort is put in, then the success is one piece, one small part at a time. Things will get better.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Would you say that, you know, we talk about as peers, we want to end the stigma, end the stigma, end the stigma, which is a noble goal and we absolutely should. Do you find that when you deal with folks struggling with gambling addiction, that if you, in addition, or weaving in the story about powerlessness or having something in your life go awry where you needed recovery, in this case, if we’re talking about gambling, that sometimes the science helps to assuage some of the shame, some of the guilt, doesn’t necessarily take away responsibility for action, but says, there’s a really, really, really identifiable reason why you’re doing what you’re doing. Which isn’t just you’re more worthless than a rock.
DON MCCOURTNEY: That’s absolutely true. That’s why I try to spend time when I do the training with the peers, giving them information about the different types of the three levels of the brain, and what that prefrontal cortex really does, and how that is hijacked. One of the things that we know, for example, that when a person, earlier that they’re introduced to gambling, the greater the opportunity for them to become later on in life, having a problem gambling. Because if you think about it, most of us don’t take a fifth of booze or bourbon and plunk it in the middle of the table in front of our 10-year-old son or daughter and say, hey, come on, let’s get drunk together.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Generally not, it’s not the preferred method of parenting.
DON MCCOURTNEY: That’s right, that’s right.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Is it frowned on?
DON MCCOURTNEY: So what we’ll do, and I’ve heard people talk about this, they will bring a lottery ticket home for the 10-year-old to play, or Christmas, or birthday, or just for the fun of it, to be a part of what mom and dad’s doing. Grandma will bring it in. So what they’re doing is they’re really setting that young person up because their brain’s now becoming accustomed to what that lottery ticket is going to do versus riding a bike, or playing ball, or whatever. I’m 70, so whatever young people do today. Right. So that brain becomes more dependent, if you will, on the outside stimulus, and that’s the gambling, even though people often don’t think lottery is a form of gambling, but it is.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Oh, sure.
DON MCCOURTNEY: People don’t think bingo is a form of gambling, but it is. Because gambling, simply put, is I have something, I’m willing to wage on a particular process to get something that you may have, and I’m willing to risk that for this process to get something that you have. That’s how gambling is.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: It reminds me of the statement when someone would say, I’m not a gambling man, but if I was, I’d gamble on that. The sure win.
DON MCCOURTNEY: Yeah. By telling people about the brain chemistry, I do believe it helps. It’s not an excuse, but at least it’s an awareness that there’s something not innately wrong with me, that I’m not inferior. Exactly. Unfortunately, with gambling addiction, it is such a hidden addiction because you can’t hear it, you can’t see it, you can’t smell it. It is something that you can’t do a toxicology test on. It’s generally done alone, even if you’re at the casinos, because it’s not like sitting at a bar, throwing them back and talking to your buddy. If a person has a problem with gambling, they’re going to be focused on the gambling. They don’t want to talk to anybody because they don’t want that energy messed with. And so when you look at the gambler, they have a fallacy. They believe that past events will predict future ones. And that past events will predict future ones of the same thing, meaning that problem gamblers have a system. Everyone that I’ve dealt with in my entire career, everyone of them had a system. They’re all systems of similar or dissimilar, it doesn’t matter. But they know their system will work. Because it worked this time, and given enough time, it will work again. Now, maybe three years, but it will work again.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: How much do you lose between now and then working again?
DON MCCOURTNEY: That’s right, that’s right. And remember that each time they win, even a little bit, or a near win, and they’re thinking that dopamine is activated.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Which solidifies the belief.
DON MCCOURTNEY: Yes, that’s it. They’re called magical beliefs. And most thinking errors, whatever you want to call them, I interchange it between magical beliefs and untruths.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: When you talk with someone with a gambling addiction issue, what’s something that you say that might shake them up, but that is not shaking them up to hurt them, but is shaking that magical belief with some truth that can lead to a breakthrough?
DON MCCOURTNEY: Well, let’s say that their belief is about machines. 80% of people who gamble use the machines. It’s not the table games. And the same percentage of people who work for a problem gambling, 80% of them are doing the machines. And they have a lot of false beliefs about the machines, such as if they play the machine at a specific time of day, at a specific place, that what will happen, they will win. So I asked them, okay, let’s talk about that. Have you ever lost there? Well, yeah. Let’s talk about then how that particular place in that particular time, how come that’s so lucky if you lose?
CHRIS NEWCOMB: I’m guessing at that point in the conversation, they’re not enjoying themselves.
DON MCCOURTNEY: They look at me, well, but I’ll eventually win. I say, okay, how much money do you think you’ve lost over a period of the last, let’s say five years was a gambling in history, five years of gambling? Well, I hadn’t thought about, okay, well, I’m going to ask you to do some. I’d like you to do an assignment for it and bring it back, and I’d like you to identify how much money you believe that you’ve lost. However, you come up with it, you might want to look at your checkbook, you might want to look at your credit cards, you might want to look at how many credit cards you have, and how many of them are no longer, you’re not paid on them and you can’t borrow on them anymore. However, you get to it, and we’ll talk about it. Then they get to do some thinking about, well, this credit card, this, this, this, and this, and this. Well, wait a minute. And, and, and so then bring it back and okay. So I started out with one person, she had $5,000 within about four visits. She had actually had $85,000 on credit card debt.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: She started with $5,000 and how long she got $85,000?
DON MCCOURTNEY: Well, in four weeks, then we identified she had $85,000 in debt, not just $5,000.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Wow, she had missed $80,000. She was in debt.
DON MCCOURTNEY: Poor thing. Let’s take a look at your credit cards. So that machine at that time of the day really hasn’t been very lucky for you. So let’s talk about, when we talk about the den, I talk about the gambler’s fallacy and how that’s a part of the thinking here, that you believe on a Tuesday afternoon at 2 o’clock, you can play this machine at this casino, for example, and that it will be successful. How many times have you done that? Now you see your credit cards are maxed out and you’re this much into debt. So she started to see some of that. So it’s like chipping a piece of the time. So they can begin to see that their system isn’t successful. But problem gamblers, the key of working with them is money. Because that’s the substance that drives it. But they don’t have money, they can’t gamble.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Right.
DON MCCOURTNEY: And so the key is the money. And when you look at the research, people who have a problem with gambling as a whole, when they end up in some kind of help, would generally have between $135,000 and $170,000 in debt. Well, one of the things that I wanted to make sure that we had a couple moments to talk about is that gambling, imagine, gambling, people who have a problem with gambling and they’re involved with somebody in a relationship, that they’ve determined to be monogamous. That person, that other person, when it all comes out, they have a 78 percent chance of going separate ways, divorce. Because it’s like being married to somebody for 20 years, and then on the 21st year, you find out that person has been cheating on you the whole 20 years for the same person.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Yeah, it’s hard to come back from.
DON MCCOURTNEY: Right. So the family devastation is so incredible because it’s got to do with the finances. How can you ever trust him or her again with the money? How do these credit cards, we’re in a state that we both have to pay for these, whether it’s in your name or my name. Now, how in the world is a husband, but I’m going to have to pay off $80,000 in credit cards, for example.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: That’ll create resentment.
DON MCCOURTNEY: We’re going to go through divorce and you did that, my attorney is going to make your attorney, I’m not going to buy. I know a lady whose husband died, he had a problem with gambling, and she’s still paying the gambling debts off, even though he’d been dead two or three years. You don’t have that happen with alcohol and other substances. The finances are so incredible, and the damage to the family is so incredible. That goes along with the idea that with problem gambling, there is such a staggering amount of restitution. You got to pay this back to the family, to the friends, if you’ve stolen money from work or whatever. You don’t get off on that. You got to pay that back.
You heard of drug courts, most of us have. Well, there’s only one gambling court that I’m aware of in the United States and that’s in Nevada. No other state has a gambling court that functions like a drug court except for the state of Nevada. Really? Because the criminal justice system sees the gamblers as thieves, as poor moral care. They go to prison. You think about it. I had a guy when I was in Nevada who was the vice president of one of the casinos, not top vice president, but in a particular area, and he had an accounting degree and a master’s in finance, and he got caught taking money from the company. He had about $140,000, $150,000, and they caught him. Well, the casino wants what?
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Money.
DON MCCOURTNEY: They want the money, and they want him to be punished. The laws are, you can’t do that. Before they all went to court, we worked with him a little bit and really paying a lot of attention to his wanting to self-harm. What happens is that he went ahead, he lost his wife over the situation, he lost his family. He had stolen money from, and I use that word stolen, money from the kids at school, allowance that he and the wife had put together for years. Then the youngest, oldest one was getting ready to go to college, and he was going to senior year. Wife didn’t pay any attention to that because he had a financial background, he was the CPA. He’d stolen all the money out of there except for a few hundreds, there had been thousands of dollars. He divorced at home, and then he got caught with the embezzlement, and so we had to pay real close attention to him. But he went to prison, and when he got out of prison, he couldn’t be licensed as CPA, no casino was going to keep him. How is he ever going to earn enough money to pay back that $140,000 restitution? He was going to pay that back until he died.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Wow.
DON MCCOURTNEY: So the devastation because of the finances is so incredible that it is hard to imagine digging yourself out of that.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: That’s a huge hole.
DON MCCOURTNEY: That’s a huge hole. And even if it’s $50,000, my wife come home tonight and say, you know, I got a problem gambling. Here’s 10 credit cards, it’s $10,000. And we got to pay for them.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Let me cut the TV off for a second.
DON MCCOURTNEY: So the American Disability Act, that doesn’t apply to problem gamblers. It applies to people with mental health challenges and to people with substance use disorders, but not to a problem gambler.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Wow.
DON MCCOURTNEY: So there’s just a lot of growth that needs to happen. Well, that’s right. That’s right. It’s hard to find people and organizations and clinicians that understand problem gambling, that provide recovery or provide treatment, because people just don’t know what to do.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Because it’s usually seen as somebody’s like, they’re just greedy, they’re money hungry.
DON MCCOURTNEY: That’s it. That’s right. That’s right. Then the other thing is that you think about it. There’s no one entity throughout the United States that covers gambling as an agency or as an organization. Each state has different rules and different people who govern. Two states, the United States, only two, Utah and Hawaii, that don’t have legalized gambling, lottery or anything. I think because of the Mormon influence. But the other 48 states has something. In the state of Virginia, we have four different agencies that take care of the different gambling venues we have. In some states, there is under one umbrella. But their rules are different than Virginia’s. Virginia’s are different than Nevada’s. So it’s not consistent.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Yeah. You don’t have a governing body, which then helps everybody get on the same page.
DON MCCOURTNEY: Exactly.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: You’ve got municipalities and localities and all that, and states and see things differently. And so no standard uniform would care and understanding, it sounds like. Well, it goes back to when you were saying that problem gambling now is a lot like what alcoholism, recovery was in the 70s. Kind of sometimes throwing it against the wall and see what sticks.
DON MCCOURTNEY: And yeah, because you didn’t know, we had all kinds of things that we did that didn’t really work out. We now know that.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: I know.
DON MCCOURTNEY: It’s different.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: My first foray into gambling, I should say my first and really finally only foray into gambling. I was in high school as a senior and we had a class trip. So we went to the Bahamas. So we go to the Bahamas and I didn’t really want to be there, but we go to the Bahamas and when I go to the, I guess it was the blackjack table. So I go and play blackjack and I win 75 bucks and I’m like, yeah, 75, yeah, let’s do this again, baby. Boom, there goes the 75 bucks. Thankfully, I was smart enough to walk away at that point. But I remember that lesson and it was like, I guess it was that dopamine and also that teenage brain.
DON MCCOURTNEY: Oh, yeah.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: With the dopamine is like, oh, this is the greatest thing ever. I’m going to do this all the time. I walked away and I can see how the fallacy can happen too, because I was talking to somebody the other day. I said, Powerball gets to be a billion and millions of people play it, but somebody has to win and someone does at some point. It’s a fact, so you could see how easy it is to go from just that little fact, twist it just a little bit, and now you’ve got magical thinking.
DON MCCOURTNEY: Yes.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Yes. Because somebody did win. So why can’t I? Well, you might, but it’s a very, very, very tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny chance. But then all they need to go is, well, you’re saying there’s a chance.
DON MCCOURTNEY: That’s right. That’s right. Remember, I almost won. I was one number off. I almost won. And that old brain’s just moving along 100 miles an hour.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Yeah.
DON MCCOURTNEY: With that dopamine.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: That’s going, man. For sure.
DON MCCOURTNEY: For me, I don’t play any of that stuff, but it’s real simple. I don’t see that I almost won. I lost. When I moved to Vegas, we played poker at home, Rample and his pennies. We’d win. They were still his pennies, and we played with his pennies. It was his pennies, so we always kept them. But we learned to do that as a kid. When I went out to Vegas and moved out there, I gambled once my entire time out there. I was out there 20 years. I hadn’t been there very long, so we played the slot machine, and in less than 15 minutes, my 20 bucks was gone. I’m depressed. I’m going for a cry now. Well, my favorite food in the world is pizza. I could have had a pizza and a soda, and I could have been watching a cowboy show. Instead of sitting here, 20 minutes later, feeling like this, this is not fun. My brother, what happened to him, he played blackjack. He had two $20 bills. He took and spent the $20, ended up with $200. He maintains that was his hook. He said there was nothing. He chased that the entire six months he lived there, because of what happened that one time. That triggered the whole thing for him.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: He knew that if he could do it once, or if it could happen once, because let’s be honest, it’s not us doing anything. I mean, the cards are going to fall where they are. You’re not magically making that card happen. It’s just the guy pulls it, or the woman pulls it, bang, there it is on the table.
DON MCCOURTNEY: And it’s interesting, they’ll do it. My brother still says what he always tried to do was the last one to get dealt, so he could see all the cards. Now, the craziness is they’re playing four decks and a shoe, and that’s how they’re dealing from that shoe. You can’t count for, it’s impossible. My brother’s a pretty bright guy. I don’t mean it because he’s my brother, he’s a pretty bright guy, and he couldn’t count them.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: That’s like 208 cards.
DON MCCOURTNEY: Okay.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: I mean, it’s 52 cards in a deck and it’s four decks, right?
DON MCCOURTNEY: Yeah.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: My math is right. I’m not that great at math, but I think that’s right. That’s a lot of cards.
DON MCCOURTNEY: 208 cards is right. There’s no way he could keep track what this one got, this one got, and this one got, what could be in the show. It was impossible. But he thought he could work out a system. Wow. He did. His system was, he went to a particular casino on a particular night, set a particular table, and try to find the same dealer because that’s where he got lucky. Problem gamblers have this belief they have this personal relationship with luck. They don’t anymore, anybody else. He hasn’t gambled since the 90s now. About two years ago, he was looking for years to get a 1971 charger. He’d been looking around and didn’t want this, but finally got one. He said, I got lucky. I found the one I wanted. I said, how many years did you look for it? Or two or three years? How’s that got to do with luck? That meant you did a lot of work. But see, even now, his thinking is the same way.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Right. Yeah, he’s still, yeah, and it’s, I can see how it can be a world crushing thing for someone with problem gambling when that reality kind of hits, oh my gosh, I’ve really been playing myself and not realizing I’ve been playing myself because my brain, because of the addiction, has brought its own trickery to the other part of my brain. And now, you can see where that’s where shame and guilt comes in because it’s like, oh, so stupid, when you see that nobody else does this, you’re an idiot, blah, blah, blah, a negative self-talk. And then that’s where, I think, I’m sure you as a peer can come in and say, no, no, no, no, no, this isn’t about a worth thing as a human being. You have worth just because you exist. This is about a behavior that is not life-giving to you.
DON MCCOURTNEY: And we all know that it all starts out in the brain.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Yes.
DON MCCOURTNEY: And once in a while, somebody had said to me, well, how come my brain worked that way, but someone else’s didn’t? I said, well, how come some of us seem to have, if we take an IQ test, our tests are much higher than others, just the way we are. How come I have brown eyes and you have blue eyes?
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Yeah, I sometimes tell people, if you don’t believe that the brain is powerful, just remember this, the brain named itself.
DON MCCOURTNEY: That’s what you’re dealing with. That’s exactly, I named me, my God, that’s an important part of all the brain.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Yeah, I mean, you think about it, and even in our conversation, we are using the brain to talk about how the brain doesn’t work in certain areas, but certain areas of the brain does work. The brain is pretty powerful. We got to treat it with care, handle with care, and humility, not humiliation, but humility, because it will humble you quickly when it decides to do not so great things.
DON MCCOURTNEY: Yes. The other thing is, if you want to end some of this, there was a study out of the University of Chicago on 75 people who had committed suicide and they did a psychological autopsy. They found that all these 75 people had a problem gambling. They had been treated for substance use disorder, alcohol or other drugs. They’ve been treated for mental health challenges, anxiety, depression. But none of them had been treated for problem gambling, because they didn’t get the questions asked. Because in all the years I’ve done what I’ve done with Joint Commission, Federation of Healthcare Organizations, Medicare, Medicaid, the State of Virginia, DBDHS, and I’m not bad mouth them. It’s just the whole system works that way.
TRICARE. There’s no questions on any of those assessments about gambling. There’s question about depression, there’s question about anxiety, there’s questions about suicide, there’s questions about past attempts, there’s questions about alcohol usage, there’s questions about drug usage, question about what kind of medications you are. Go to your physician, go to your dentist, go to your caregiver of any kind, and they’re not going to ask you about the gambling. They’ll ask you all these other questions, but they don’t say, so tell me, Chris, tell me about your gambling. Why don’t gamble? Never? Well, no, not never. Okay. How often do you gamble, Chris?
CHRIS NEWCOMB: You’re right. They don’t.
DON MCCOURTNEY: What happens is that that whole piece is missed, and as a result, let’s say that you have a problem gambling, you have a problem with depression. You can certainly intervene with the depression and support, and support, and give encouragement, and give in different ways to think, and you can be, but if you’re continuing to gamble, the depression can’t get any better. And the same thing with substance use, the same thing with anxiety. And so approximately 25, actually 45% of people that are problem gamblers have thought about suicide, and the rate is about anywhere between 19 and 22%.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: This is a life or death deal.
DON MCCOURTNEY: Yes, it’s fair. And we’re going to make progress. I’m too old to be around to see much of it, but we’re going to make, because we’ve made some progress.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Sure.
DON MCCOURTNEY: Because here I am talking to you. I got hired by the state to implement information to the Peer Force about problem gambling. They didn’t have that three years ago.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: That’s a big move. That’s a big, you’re taking the ball forward quite a bit. So in closing our time, and that’s a perfect segue, I was going to ask if someone here, when someone hears this podcast, whether it’s a peer support worker or a peer supports just another peer, and they hear this and they go, I have a problem or I know somebody that does, what’s their next step? Who do they call? Who do they contact?
DON MCCOURTNEY: It’s a real simple, 1-800-GAMBLER.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Pretty easy, 1-800-GAMBLER, correct?
DON MCCOURTNEY: That’s correct. And that’s the Virginia Problem Gambling Helpline. And there are peers that are handling that line, that can can talk to families or to to the problem gambling with themself and help engage them into some kind of care. Their people can get even if they don’t have any money and their insurance or their insurance won’t pay, there are funds for people to get care free for problem gambling.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: That’s awesome.
DON MCCOURTNEY: From peers to help as well as for clinicians or family members. It’s all part of it.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Well, that’s amazing. Dr. McCourtney, also known as Don, preferably Don. I want to thank you for being here today and all the wisdom you’ve shared from your own personal experience in going in recovery and then by proxy, your brother and then all of the time you’ve spent in academics and business. And all of that to come to this place now where you’re helping folks with the problem gambling. It’s a wonderful service that you’re doing. And again, to those who are listening, if there’s someone you know who has a problem with gambling, or maybe you who are listening, there’s hope. The number you can call is 1-800-GAMBLER, G-A-M-B-L-E-R. And it’s confidential. And is it 24-7-365? Are there certain hours?
DON MCCOURTNEY: 24-7-365.
CHRIS NEWCOMB: Okay, so 3 o’clock in the morning, if you’re feeling it, call them. They’re there for you. You bet. I’d like to thank our listeners for listening to the Peer Into Recovery Podcast, which is brought to you by the Virginia Peer Recovery Specialist Network and Mental Health America of Virginia. And if you like our show and would like to subscribe to the podcast, please visit our website at www.vprsn.org. And please leave us a brief review on iTunes. In the meantime, take care of yourselves, everyone. We’ll see you soon.
