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I’ve written a series of papers re: how people are treated under Canadian bankruptcy law when their financial difficulties are attributable to gambling - the most recent published last month in @ohlj. I’ve been thinking about how I became interested in this area. Here’s the story https://twitter.com/OHLJ/status/1341091030939168768
In my PhD @AllardLaw, I set out to understand how insolvency trustees (private sector professionals) determine whether they think a bankrupt individual should receive automatic debt relief or not. As part of that research, I interviewed insolvency trustees across Canada.
I created a bunch of “hypothetical” debtors that I asked trustees about. These hypotheticals were based on debtor types who repeatedly show up in written decisions from bankruptcy court, e.g., the tax debtor, the family law litigant, the debtor who gambles.
I had expected that each trustee would have a very different idea of what a deserving debtor looked like. I was wrong! Trustees were pretty consistent in how they thought about deservingness.
In my book, Trustees at Work, I attribute this consistency to the way their discretion is constrained by the financial and emotional pressures of their work. https://www.ubcpress.ca/trustees-at-work
But there was one debtor type about whom trustees disagreed: the debtor who gambles. Some viewed it as a moral failing worthy of punishment, others as a medical problem in need of treatment.
I explored these different responses in my first article, “Gambling Debt in Personal Insolvency Proceedings: The Approach of Insolvency Trustees and Judicial Officers” in the Annual Review of Insolvency Law 2016 (available on westlaw)
As I started reading more about disordered gambling, I was struck by a disconnect between how insolvency trustees (and the general public) thought individuals with gambling problems could be helped, and what researchers in the area were finding.
In my 2nd article, Bankrupt Gamblers: Research Informed Practice for Insolvency Trustees in Annual Review of Insolvency Law 2018, Arooj Shah ( @mltaikins) & I synthesized literature on disordered gambling to explain how trustees can identify & help individuals w/ gambling problems
Trustees who treat gambling as a medical (as opposed to moral) problem adopt therapeutic (as opposed to punitive) responses to individual bankrupts. Overall, this is good! But I have some misgivings about the medicalization of gambling & I unpack them in my most recent article.
I argue that there are 2 downsides to medicalizing gambling: it can justify paternalistic (sometimes harmful) interventions & it can obscure the social context in which people experience problem gambling. These drawbacks apply in other contexts where we medicalize problems.
Gambling is a fascinating subject b/c it’s theoretically complex & has important real-world impacts. Researchers working @ualberta, @ucalgary or @ulethbridge can access funding to study gambling through @agri. Happy to chat more w/ anyone thinking about doing work in this area!
