Our mission

To support people bereaved by gambling-related suicide and to improve mental health and save lives through growing awareness of gambling harm and its causes.

To achieve our mission, our strategic priorities are:

• Support for families bereaved by gambling-related suicide  
• Investigating and learning from every death
• Public health information
• Research and evidence of gambling harm

Gambling with Lives runs the UK’s only support service for families bereaved by a suicide directly caused or influenced by gambling. Founded by families bereaved by gambling, we understand the devastation that gambling suicide causes and the traumatic impact of learning about what happened to the person you loved. Our service is free to use, independent of gambling industry influence, and is not time-limited.

In 2023, in partnership with the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, we launched Chapter One to address the UK’s gambling public health crisis. Chapter One provides information and support for everyone affected by gambling, including training for professionals, self-exclusion tools, and access to effective, industry-independent treatment and support.

Our background

Our co-founders, Liz and Charles Ritchie, lost their son Jack to gambling-related suicide in 2017 which led them to find and meet other bereaved families. Many of the loved ones lost to gambling were young, and for many gambling was the only challenge they faced.

Gambling with Lives’ campaigning has had a remarkable impact on the discourse surrounding the risks of gambling. Working alongside gamblers in recovery and other campaigners, bereaved families helped secure the long-awaited review of the 2005 Gambling Act, which was announced in 2020.

Following several delays, the white paper was published in 2023 and included a statutory levy to fund independent education, treatment and research and a focus on dangerous gambling products, signalling an important shift away from the “individual responsibility” model.

Thanks to the efforts of bereaved families, the clear link between gambling disorder and suicide is now widely recognised, with gambling included in the government’s National Suicide Prevention Strategy for the first time, which was published in autumn 2023.

Also in 2023, Professor Sir Louis Appleby, Chair of the National Suicide Prevention Strategy Advisory Group, stated that gambling can be a dominant factor in suicide, without which a suicide would not have occurred, with the Samaritans supporting this view in a public statement.

Liz and Charles were both awarded MBEs in the 2023 New Year Honours List for their services to charity and bereaved families.

The 2025 NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) guidelines on gambling-related harm recommended that healthcare professionals – including GPs – routinely ask patients about their gambling habits during health checks or consultations, alongside questions on smoking and alcohol, to identify gambling‑related harms earlier on and offer effective interventions and support.

Our focus

Gambling with Lives is free of the gambling industry’s influence and we scrutinise the industry’s role in facilitating and sustaining “problem gambling”. We challenge the gambling industry’s prevailing “responsible gambling” narrative which puts the responsibility to limit gambling harm on the individual and deflects attention away from the industry itself and its addictive products and predatory practices.

Our values