Conference Recap from NCPG Annual Conference 2026
I spent last week in Nashville at NCPG’s annual conference and had to take a few extra days to write this because I couldn’t figure out exactly how to capture it.
How do you summarize an iceberg when you’ve only seen its tip?
There were close to 800 people there, multiple panels every hour, and wherever I turned were three conversations I wanted needed to join. Heck, I barely even saw the Nashville sky until Friday night, when it was all over except for some karaoke, which might have been the best hour of the week.
What I love about the work I do is that it allows me to engage with people I admire and that inspire me. I’m not a clinician, nor am I a public health worker, nor a researcher, nor even a person with the badge of recovery and lived experience. Yet, I have reason to sit with all of these groups, sometimes at the exact same time, and that’s pretty cool. The lived-experience folks and their families who know this disorder from the inside out. The public health worker mobilizing resources to protect and treat our communities. The researchers using our greatest tool of discovery to get to the heart of the how. The clinicians putting all of it into play and getting real-time, real-world feedback.
There’s a Mister Rogers line about looking for the helpers. In Nashville, there were rooms full of them. Genuine people, doing this work because they see a real problem and real people suffering and want to help. I find most people interesting on their own terms anyway and this conference presented me with some of the best. I tried mightily to get to all of it.
A few things stood out enough to call out directly:
Getting to schmooze with Richard Rosenthal, who literally co-authored Gambling Disorder into the DSM about of all things, Dostoevsky.
A panel on how to involve families in gambling treatment. Hearing the hard-earned best practices from the very best on the front lines about if, how, and when to involve family in treatment is something we’ll be taking a much deeper look at.
A panel on hobby addiction, and how you’d actually screen for it, was part of a whole constellation of adjacent topics circling gambling disorder.
I watched a room build a song from nothing, start to finish, and what came out was… not even too bad!
I met vendors and orgs doing amazing work (looking at you Parents Standing Together) building support structures I hadn’t seen before. Financial tools, apps, treatment programs, advocates. A lot of good people, building a lot of good things.
There were more challenging parts to sit with such as discussions about the explosion of the gambling, “gambling,” and gaming industries. The rise of sports betting. Gambling advertising and gamblification invading all space. Every session on treatment access happened against the backdrop of an onslaught that isn’t slowing down.
For us, this was also something like a coming-out party. Clear Odds Recovery isn’t open yet. We’re still building our model, developing our programming, and assembling our team. But this was the first time we showed up in front of this field as who we are, not as an idea. The response from everyone was better than I let myself expect. People asked questions and gave feedback, and welcomed us into the mission.
We’re taking all the panels and conversations and things we’re still chewing on back with us in hopes that we can do our part in alleviating the suffering brought on by gambling addiction.
See you all next year in Chicago and until then we’ll keep doing the work.
