Hanna Horvath

And so even though I do think it's creating a financial crisis for a lot of people, especially young men, I don't think there's any real incentive for anybody to kind of stop it.

Oh, absolutely.

So in the last three years, it's like 95% of what we see are young men struggling with gambling disorder on their phones.

And it's not just one app, it's multiple apps.

It's cryptocurrency, it's meme coin, it's stocks, and of course, sports betting leading the pack.

And, you know, like just this past week, the last patient I saw, a really nice young man, a college student, he came in

with about a year and a half of gambling behavior that started when he came to college.

And he's out about a couple hundred thousand, drained his entire college savings account in about two years.

And you think about what impact that has on his life for the next 20 years.

I mean, he will always have this memory.

The shame, the guilt, the depression, the lying, the lost time that he has in college.

Instead of going to parties and learning new things and trying new things, he just sat in his room on his phone.

And the fascinating thing about this young man, never set foot inside a brick-and-mortar casino.

Never talked with a human bookie.

Everything's on his phone.

And so that requires us as treatment providers have a very different kind of treatment because it's all digital access that he's struggling with.

In this young man's example, you know, he loved sports.

And around him was a bunch of other classmates who loved betting on sports.

So it was a common social activity.

So, and then in his case, you know, he really likes it.