LAist July 13, 2026

L.A. Therapists Are Seeing More Young Patients With Gambling Problems — They Blame Kalshi

Therapists across Los Angeles say they are seeing a wave of younger patients with gambling problems, and many point to prediction markets — especially Kalshi, which now dominates U.S. prediction-market activity. Dr. Timothy Fong, co-director of UCLA’s Gambling Studies Program, reports rising demand for treatment and a striking demographic shift: many of the new patients are in their late teens and early 20s and never set foot in a casino, but were drawn in by an app with 24/7 markets and prices that move by the second. The story describes a UCLA patient who lost more than $150,000 in college funds in about 18 months, and a UCLA survey of Greek-life students in which roughly 13% said they had placed prediction-market bets. Because these platforms are legal at 18 and framed as trading rather than betting, clinicians say they blur the line for young people — and are easy to reach even for minors using a parent’s credentials. As one therapist put it, young sports bettors are “going straight to Kalshi and getting sucked in very easily.”

Our Thoughts

For years the worry was the sportsbook — the app with the team logos and the same-game parlays. This story is about the next door down the hall. Prediction markets like Kalshi are legal at 18, marketed as ‘trading’ rather than betting, and they reach exactly the people who’d never have walked into a casino: college students, first-jobbers, kids on a parent’s login. When a clinician who runs a university gambling program says his intake is filling with 18-to-20-year-olds, that’s not a trend piece — it’s an early-warning siren.

The detail that stays with us is the $150,000 in college money gone in 18 months. That’s the arithmetic of a product built for speed — markets that never close, prices that move every few seconds, and a design that rewards checking again, and again, and again. Calling it ‘trading’ doesn’t change what it does to a nervous system, and the ‘is it really gambling?’ debate is cold comfort to a 20-year-old staring at an empty account. Whatever the regulators decide to call it, the people in these therapists’ offices are describing the same disorder we hear about in every meeting.

If you’re young and this reads like your last few months — the account you can’t stop refreshing, the losses you’re hiding, the money that was meant for something else — you are not the first person it happened to, and you’re not too young to stop. A free, anonymous online meeting is full of people who started exactly where you are. No account, no cost, no judgment — just a room where the refreshing stops.

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