JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Colleges are abuzz with the excitement of March Madness. And even though a school like the University of Mississippi is not in the Final Four of this year, plenty of its students are gambling, and it's not just on basketball. Like so many Americans, they're betting on everything, so much so that Ole Miss decided to open a first-of-its-kind center for collegiate gambling to address the issue. Daniel Durkin is a founding member of this center. He is an associate professor of social work, and he joins us now. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
DANIEL DURKIN: Thank you. I appreciate you having me.
SUMMERS: Thanks for being here. I just want to start by asking you, was there a moment where the prevalence of students gambling hit your radar?
DURKIN: We had a conference a couple years ago, where we brought a gambling expert to our conference to talk about gambling issues that were going on, particularly on college campuses. And what he had to say alarmed me. And so what I did was I came back to the university and spent some time talking with our administration, who were very supportive, and we decided that this was something that we needed to do something about.
SUMMERS: How do you hope that the center will meet that need, particularly among college students. We're talking about people who are probably ages 18 to 22, something like that?
DURKIN: So we've already established a task force where we're making efforts for education prevention. We're also starting some intervention efforts. For instance, we have eight of our counselors that have already been - received, like, the basic training on dealing with gambling problems. And then we're also looking at research and policy, see what kinds of things we can do. But we feel like our students know what to do if they have a alcohol or drug problem or if their roommate has an alcohol or drug problem. Where we're not at yet is that if their roommate has a gambling problem, we don't feel like we're in the position for them to be confident in sending their friends to the health center. So that's what we're looking to achieve.
SUMMERS: I understand that your concern isn't necessarily about the legality. It's about the impact on the students and their lives and their communities. Give us an example or two, if you can, of what you've been seeing.
DURKIN: So interestingly, at the health center, we haven't been seeing much, and that's of concern to us. We think that maybe students just see it right now as a financial problem, and maybe, you know, they're not going to go to the health center that (ph). We started seeing a few more referrals from parents. What it looks like is, well, I'll give you an example. It was a student assignment where they had to describe a ethical dilemma going on in their personal life. And what the student wrote was, my roommate gambles all day. He's online betting on sports until sports is over. Then when sports is over, he gets on the online casinos. And the student went on to say, further, I feel like I should tell his parents, but I know he'll be angry with me.
I like to use that scenario to point out to people that there's more than one person in distress in this scenario, right? There's two people in distress. Mostly what we've been hearing has been by word of mouth. Now, we did do the statewide study last spring, where we found that 40% of students were gambling, and then a significant proportion of them were having some problems because of the gambling.
SUMMERS: Big picture, when we think about treating or addressing gambling addiction versus, say, substance abuses like drugs or alcohol, how is it different? And what types of resources would you like to see, particularly for young people on campuses like yours?
DURKIN: What we may see is we may have students come in reporting, you know, issues with mental health or alcohol problems, and if we delve a little deeply, we may find that the root cause of that is gambling issues. Right now, what we're doing at Ole Miss is we're starting with our university and we're coming up with a plan for our university. What we'd like to do at the center then is work with the other institutions in the state to develop their own plans because what works at Ole Miss may not work at Jackson State. And so what we'd like to see is the state develop the capacity to take care of students, you know, as they develop these problems, see if we can prevent them from happening in the first place.
SUMMERS: We've been speaking with Daniel Durkin. He's a founding member of the center for collegiate gambling at the University of Mississippi. Thank you so much.
DURKIN: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF KENNY ROGERS SONG, "THE GAMBLER") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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