Medical Examiner in Newfoundland has begun tracking gambling as a risk factor in suicides

By Rob Csernyik, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Independent

Brad Glynn says “postvention”—the actions taken in response to suicides—is an essential type of prevention. As executive director of  the mental health nonprofit Lifewise NL, having data on risk factors  which lead to these deaths is useful to his organization’s peer support  and public education. It will soon have access to data for a risk factor  that’s been long neglected in Newfoundland and Labrador: gambling.

The Independent has learned that, in mid-November, the  province’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) began collecting  data on gambling as a risk factor for suicide. The office says “[t]here  is also on-going retrospective data collection for all suicides for the  period of November 15, 2024-November 15, 2025.”

This makes good on a 2024 OCME promise to explore tracking gambling-related suicides, “as well as a number of potential suicide risk factors, for statistical tracking and reporting purposes.”

In a national investigation  of gambling-related suicides in Canada supported by the Michener-Deacon  Fellowship for Investigative Reporting, Newfoundland and Labrador was  one of only two provinces that provided no data. Though researchers  suggest at least five to 10 per cent of suicides are gambling-related,  only one was clearly identified in the public record in Newfoundland and  Labrador: the 2003 death of Corner Brook resident Susan Piercey.

Glynn says that with gambling as a proven risk factor for suicide,  along with increased online gambling availability, it’s important to  track and see this data. The November 2025 report Online Gambling Among Young Canadian Adults: A Call to Action  found that of young adults who gamble online, “69.4 per cent met the  criteria for problem gambling and 23.5 per cent reported experiencing a  high level of gambling-related harms.”

According to 2024 survey data from Mental Health Research Canada,  one-fifth of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians overall show some signs of  risky gambling behaviours, with seven per cent exhibiting signs of  gambling problems.

“It’s great that we’re starting to track this,” Glynn says. “I think  that’s where learning can happen for government, for the health system,  for community organizations like us, and even for individuals to  understand the real impacts.”

Though the OCME’s plan represents a step forward, the office isn’t  willing to share details about how the policy change works in practice.

The Independent first learned of the change in December 2025  and was told Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Nash Denic would be unavailable  for an interview. We provided a list of written questions instead, but  an unnamed person from the OCME said it was “short staffed over the  holiday season” and couldn’t respond until the new year.

The questions included what methods the OCME would use to track risk  factor information, if it was borrowing from practices of other Canadian  coroner or medical examiner offices, and what other suicide risk  factors it would track besides gambling.

In January, the OCME declined to answer the questions.  “Unfortunately, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner cannot share  publicly our processes for investigation and data collection in cases of  suspected suicide,” an unnamed source said over email. “However, we can  assure you that we have included data collection for gambling as a risk  factor for suicide in our investigative process.”

The Independent also contacted Minister of Health and  Community Services and Minister of Mental Health and Addictions Lela  Evans to discuss the policy change. She did not agree to an interview  either. Instead, her communications staff shared a statement that  offered no further insight into the information gaps on the OCME’s new  approach to tracking gambling-related suicides.

Without insights from the government or the OCME, it’s challenging,  if not impossible, to understand how effective new suicide risk factor  tracking methods will be.

Angela Rintoul, principal research fellow of gambling and suicide at  the University of Melbourne, says an imperfect system is better than  none. “You’ve got to start somewhere,” she says, as long as  inefficiencies are identified and best practices evolve and improve.

The definition of “gambling-related” is key to understanding the  process, according to Rintoul. Generally, in Canada, suicides that  coroners or medical examiners associate with gambling as a risk factor  fall into two categories: gambling is mentioned in a suicide note or  directly in interviews with those close to the deceased.

Unlike alcohol or drugs, which coroner or medical examiners can test  for postmortem, gambling is invisible. “There’s no biomarker,” Rintoul  says. “Before you get to the coroner’s office, you also want to be  tracking a whole lot of other indicators in society.”

This includes recording diagnoses of gambling disorder in medical  files, as well as how many people call helplines in suicidal distress  because of gambling, or make emergency room visits or ambulance calls  for gambling-related suicide attempts. All these data points can help  inform suicide prevention rather than postvention efforts.

Rintoul says data vaults,  an emerging type of cloud storage used in at least 15 nations to record  betting data, may also help. They are set up by gambling service  providers as part of their license agreement with each jurisdiction, and  regulators download the data and have access to individual customer  transactions right up to market-wide trends.

Data vault access offers potential for government regulators to flag  potential money laundering transactions, large losses which might  suggest a player needs help, and ensure customers on self-exclusion  registers stay off. Coroner and medical examiner offices could also use  information housed in data vaults to identify gambling habits in some  suicide cases. But setting up these systems is challenging, Rintoul  says, because it requires political will and a willingness from gambling  operators to correct long-standing data gaps.

“They’ve got a lot of power by holding this data and continuing to  profit from their most valuable customers, whilst we are scrambling  around in the public health area just trying to piece very disparate  pieces of the puzzle together,” she says.

With opportunities to gamble increasing both provincewide and  nationwide, the need for clear data is more critical than ever. In the  past few years alone, Newfoundland and Labrador has legalized  single-sport betting and added an Atlantic Lottery Corporation (ALC)  online casino—to say nothing of non-regulated black and grey market  websites residents may access.

ALC, which generated nearly $273.5 million  in net revenue last fiscal year in Newfoundland and Labrador, also runs  lotteries and video lottery terminals (VLTs) across the province. The Independent  contacted ALC to inform them of the change in policy, to request  comment and to see if it will consider reviewing gambling-related  suicide data to see how the corporation could use it in social  responsibility or responsible gaming efforts.

In an emailed statement, ALC didn’t directly address the issue. “We  regularly include all existing research and expert reviews in the  development of both [ALC] products and healthy play activities,”  communications strategist Greg Weston says in part. “We want all of our  players to be informed and to play within their means and reduce the  risk of gambling-related harms.”

Lifewise NL is more direct, with Glynn saying the organization can  put the gambling-related suicide data to use. He adds the organization  is also interested in learning more about other other suicide risk  factors, like “social determinants of health,” for instance, if the  deceased were facing food or housing insecurity, underemployment, or  were from marginalized groups. “This overly individualized western world  looks at everything as an individual problem, but suicide risk factors  can be approached and can be improved at a society level,” he says.

The OCME expects to have the first gambling-related suicide statistics available at the end of 2026.