Wellness & Well-being Highlights October 27th

Wellness & Well-being Highlights

for the

Week of October 27, 2025

This week’s edition of our Worker Wellness & Well-being blog provides us a look at advances with Parkinson’s disease—to an examination of football player safety: NFL v High School—to how tariffs have caused shortages and raised the price of firetrucks in communities.

This week I would like to discuss—what I believe to be—our nation’s next Mental Health crisis: Sports Gambling Addiction. In fact, I will go as far as saying that this issue potentially has the makings of doing worse damage than our current decades-long Opioids crisis! So, unless you have not turned on a TV or radio or live streamed news in the past week, you have heard that the FBI made several arrests connecting former and current NBA players and Underworld figures with sports-related betting schemes.[1]

Let’s face it…this is NOT rocket science! We have been here before, and, yet, NOT learned from our mistakes. This is not merely an issue of unintended consequences. It is pure and simple GREED. History reveals that when you open the flood gates crime follows. Just consider how many college sports teams and/or games are supported via alcohol advertising by A-B, Miller, etc. Meanwhile telling its audiences to drink responsibly fully knowing that many of those viewers are underage!

One month ago, I addressed the dangers of this topic in our WW blog and, in fact, our industry recently held a seminar focusing on those threats. Just yesterday, Jason Gay’s (WSJ) brutally honest piece struck right at the heart of the Sports Gambling debacle briefly captured below[2]:

Shocking? Hardly. I couldn’t have been the only person watching that highly dramatic press conference, thinking of the gambling trade’s daily assault on our senses—ads, ads, and more ads—saying: Well, what did anyone expect?

And, just last night, as I was watching a college football game the NCAA ran an ad called “Draw the line.”[3] This campaign is directed towards gamblers who lose bets and then turn their anger towards college athletes. I found it necessary to share a quote from their website below:

Sports betting is everywhere – your friends, family and classmates are placing bets, ads are impossible to miss, and the prevalence of harassment from angry fans who lost a bet continues to increase.

Seriously? The NCAA opened Pandora’s Box by cutting deals with these Sports Betting firms, making a king’s ransom on the deals, and then blames the people they need to help fuel this dystopian machine. As with the alcohol ads of yesteryear, Sports Gambling smacks its viewers with never-ending promos. The incredible amounts of money changing hands throughout the ecosystem seems to blind good, ‘second-order consequences’ type of thinking. When it comes to GREED, Gay said it best, this is “The surest of sure things.”

Please check out the rest of this week’s blog: https://moworksinitiative.org/category/worker-wellness-news/

Source [1] https://www.npr.org/2025/10/23/nx-s1-5583614/nba-gambling-arrests-terry-rozier-chauncey-billups

[2] https://www.wsj.com/sports/basketball/the-most-inevitable-scandal-in-sports-history-b9d2c5c7?st=Va72n8&reflink=article_gmail_share

[3] www.ncaa.org/drawtheline

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