By Maia Szalavitz
Catherine Townsend-Lyon, 53, started gambling excessively when she was 30. As a result, her 40th birthday wasn’t much of a celebration: She was hospitalized, shortly after a suicide attempt. She’d tried to slit her wrists the day she’d missed her best friend’s funeral, after stealing money from her job at a credit service to play the slot machines.
That was just one part of how bad it had gotten. She would arrive at casinos at 7 a.m. and wear bladder control underpants. She didn’t want to have to get up — even for a quick bathroom break — if she was on a winning streak. At one point she hoped to win back enough money to stave off foreclosure on her home.
“It’s where I could find stress relief,” she says of her gambling, which she detailed in a book titled Addicted to Dimes. “I didn’t have to worry about anything — whether it was my past, whether it was the money I’d spent. You don’t think about any of it. It’s like you just go there and you’re escaping into a whole different world,” she says.
