Gambling and Disability: An Overlooked Context for Gambling Harm

While previous studies have addressed gambling-related risks and harms from various perspectives, research on how these risks and harms relate to the experiences of people with disabilities remains limited. Furthermore, because gambling-related harms do not manifest in the same way across all groups, research should consider disability type and disability-related contexts rather than treating disability as a single category when examining the relationship between disability and gambling. This commentary reviews how disability has been addressed in existing gambling research and discusses how disability serves as an important context that can influence gambling accessibility, gambling-related harms, prevention, treatment, and recovery processes. This commentary also suggests that future research should clarify the definition and measurement of disability, analyze differences across disability types, and examine the accessibility of prevention and treatment services. This approach can serve as a starting point for integrating disability more systematically into gambling research and for developing a more comprehensive understanding of gambling-related harms.