02/23/2026
52.5% of people with co-occurring opioid use disorder and gambling disorder receive neither mental health care nor substance use disorder treatment.
Neither.
I read that statistic this morning and it stuck with me. Not because it's shocking, but because it's the gap we're actually responsible for closing. The diagnoses exist. The treatments exist. The barriers don't.
Cost, lack of information about where to go, stigma, confidentiality concerns, fear of commitment. These aren't clinical problems. They're access problems. And they're solvable.
What troubles me most is that behavioral health providers often aren't screening for comorbidities at all. Someone comes in with opioid use disorder. The gambling problem goes undiagnosed. Or vice versa. One disorder gets treated in isolation while the other compounds the damage.
We're not talking about rare edge cases here. The research shows these conditions frequently overlap, especially in younger populations and certain communities. Yet only 9.1% of people with both conditions get comprehensive treatment addressing both.
If we're serious about improving outcomes, we have to start by asking the right questions during intake. Screening matters. Integrated care matters. Meeting people where the barriers actually are matters more than anything else.
“Gambling disorder (GD) is a psychiatric condition featuring recurrent, maladaptive gambling behavior that leads to clinically significant distress. GD was reclassified recently into the “Substance-Related and Addictive Disorders” group of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disord...