Following on from our (we like to think) successful webinar looking at Gambling and Neurodiversity which happened on 19th July we have now revived our YouTube channel and put excerpts from the webinar online for anyone to watch.
We have already had members commenting on how useful (and enlightening) they found some of the material, especially those explaining ADHD. Also, that having been inspired to learn more they have now acted by contacting some of the specialists featured in the videos to help support themselves and also family members.
This is both really gratifying to hear and also highlights something which we don’t really talk enough about in recovery spaces.
Every single person is made up of a unique collection of life experiences, personalities, biological characteristics, and complex needs. The modern digital world means that we all have access to seemingly unlimited sources of information, but to find information which is particularly helpful to ourselves we either have to know exactly what we are looking for and be lucky enough to find it through carefully embedded metadata (search terms), or be very lucky in finding that what we think we might need to know (but it turns out isn’t the right answer) happens to have a direct link to something we didn’t realise we needed to know but suddenly discover that it was what we needed all along but would never have found if it wasn’t put in front of us.
Serendipity, if you like, by search engine.
But for us to stumble accidentally across what might turn out to be revelationary for us we so often need to look outside the boundaries of what we think we need.
Which is where labels and silos become a barrier.
If we are only looking for things relating to harmful gambling then we are likely only to find things marked and tagged as being to do with harmful gambling. When all along what we needed was a missing piece of the complex jigsaw which is us.
That is why GLEN feel we really need to look beyond gambling to other factors in our lives. And to take gambling to other areas where those looking there might not have realised that information about harmful gambling was what they needed to find.
That is why we see the need to try and create bridges between subject areas and communities – such as between harmful gambling and neurodiversity – so that we can better understand each other, and also potentially find that we have been looking in the wrong places when trying to fill in that missing piece of the bigger picture.
For this reason we are happy to share two things.
First of which is our YouTube channel address – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5cfMv2TRd1krCFW7FpI4iA/
Second of which is our report of what we think we learned from our own webinar about the intersections between gambling and neurodiversity. Which can be read here – Gambling and Neurodiversity Webinar – Post Event Material