Study refutes gaming-suicide link

The demographics of Las Vegas and the West -- not the gambling environment -- are what's behind the state's high suicide rate, a new study says.

Dr. Richard McCleary's report to the American Gaming Association disputed the findings of a 1997 paper that linked elevated suicide levels to legalized gambling.

The author of the earlier report, Dr. David Phillips of the University of California, San Diego, said he hadn't seen the new analysis, but he was critical of it being presented at a gaming convention and was suspicious of it being financed by the casino industry.

McCleary, who led a research team from the University of California, Irvine, said Phillips' analysis was flawed by the misuse of statistics and a failure to include an important suicide risk factor in the data.

"For gaming area residents, the risk of suicide is no higher than that faced by residents of nongaming areas," said the report, "Suicide and Gambling: An Analysis of Suicide Rates in U.S. Counties and Metropolitan Areas."

"Before-after analyses of six U.S. gaming resort counties ... show that following the legalization of gambling, suicide rates did not change by more than what would be expected of chance alone," the report said.

"For gaming area visitors, the risk of suicide is no higher that that faced by visitors to nongaming areas. When 91 U.S. metropolitan areas are ranked by visitor suicides in proportion to their visitor volume, Las Vegas, Reno and Atlantic City rank an unremarkable 26th, 37th and 87th, respectively.

"In short," McCleary's report said, "our investigation finds no evidence to support the proposition that residents or visitors of gaming areas -- including Atlantic City, Las Vegas and Reno -- face heightened risks of suicide because of the presence of gaming."

Phillips had several criticisms after reading an executive summary of the report.

"Ordinarily, papers of high quality are published in respected journals, not presented in conferences," Phillips said. "In a journal, papers are refereed by authorities.

"I have never seen the American Gaming Association say that there is anything harmful about gaming," Phillips said. "It's just like the American Tobacco Association never saying there is anything harmful with tobacco. If you ask the American Gaming Association if gambling is dangerous, the answer will always be no."

Phillips also questioned the AGA's financial backing of the McCleary report.

"I think there would have been much more confidence in this study had it not been sponsored by the American Gaming Association," Phillips said. "Very rarely does the dog bite the hand that feeds it."

Phillips said in addition to the statistical information his report offered, "there is an enormous amount of clinical evidence linking pathological gambling with suicide."

Anecdotal evidence from organizations like Gamblers Anonymous bolster his thesis, Phillips said.

"When people are economically desperate, there is a higher suicide rate," Phillips said. "And their report did not contradict our chief finding ... that Las Vegas does have the highest suicide rate in the country."

McCleary, who presented some of the results of his study in a World Gaming Conference panel on Thursday, said the AGA did not directly fund the report.

He said he had been studying suicide rates and their relationships with a number of factors at Cal-Irvine's School of Social Ecology long before the AGA presented a $37,000 grant to the school. He said the school has administered about $3.8 million in grants to programs on which has worked and none of the gifts have influenced his research.

What McCleary's research has found is that young white males -- a demographic profile that has dominated Las Vegas' boom years -- are most at risk for suicide. McCleary theorized that the West's wide open spaces and great distance from family and friends produces a loneliness that can lead to depression and suicide.

"In the West, we don't have neighbors, and we love it because of that," McCleary said. "But that's also a factor in a higher suicide rate."

McCleary's team was most critical of Phillips' use of a statistic called the "proportionate mortality ratio" -- a ratio of suicide deaths to total deaths. Because the statistic is a ratio and not a rate, much of the data gathered was not meaningful, McCleary said.

Phillips defended the use of the PMR, saying that the Registrar General's Office of England and Wales has used it to develop comparative analysis since 1841.

For his calculations on visitor suicides, McCleary used a U.S. Department of Transportation travel survey that determined the number of overnight trips to 91 metropolitan areas that had at least one visitor suicide in 1995, the most recent data.

By his calculations, Las Vegas ranked 26th, with 1.914 visitor suicides per million trips. Hamilton County, Ohio, near Cincinnati, was at the top with 8.008 visitor suicides, while Newark, N.J., was at the bottom of the list with 0.246 suicides.

Phillips said the statistics are unreliable because they rely on a non-random fraction of visitors who recorded their travels in a diary.

The increase in the number of suicide deaths after a region added casino gambling was not any greater than it would have been if left to chance. The Cal-Irvine report studied Atlantic County, N.J.; Lawrence County, S.D., home of Deadwood; Gilpin and Douglas counties, where Colorado's legal gaming is based; Harrison County, Miss., on the Gulf Coast; and Will County, Ill., 40 miles south of Chicago. The report said suicide rate increases were not significant in those locations and in Deadwood, the rate dropped.

Accurate suicide rates were not available for Clark County prior to the introduction of gambling in 1931.

McCleary also noted that a state with no gaming -- Utah -- has counties that have among the nation's highest suicide rates. Demographics of the population, he said, were behind why the rates there were so high.

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