Farmer Wants a Healthy Life
Farmer Wants a Healthy Life
Not Worth the Gamble
In this episode we hear from Dan Irwin, about his experience with gambling. Dan shares how he become addicted to gambling and how it affected him and his family. He also shares what made him quit and how he helps others to do so now.
If you need help with gambling you can contact Gamblers Help’s confidentially 24/7 for free at 1800 858 858.
Interested in the topic and looking for more?
Gambling help services:
Gamblers Help or call 1800 858 858
Cafs - Gamblers Help or call 1800 692 237
Dan talked about how he volunteers, helping others struggling with gambling. One of the programs Dan mentioned is the ReSPIN program where he shares his story with others. The other program is the Peer Connection program, talking to and helping those trying to quit.
In the episode Dan shared some of the things that he did that helped him to stop gambling. Find other tips that might work for you at:
Gambler Help - Help yourself
You can also hear other tips in our upcoming episode ‘The Hidden Harm’.
Dan urged leaders of sport clubs to talk to players about the dangers of betting and gambling. A program that could help with these discussions is Love The Game Not The Odds. It is a Victorian program focused on this as well, which your local club can get involved in.
Join the conversation
Facebook: @FarmerWantsaHealthyLife Twitter: @_FWAHL
Facebook: @FarmerWantsaHealthyLife Twitter: @_FWAHL
BM
This is a West Wimmera Health Service podcast. Presented by me Brigitte Muir.
This series focuses around stories and issues related to health and wellbeing. Some of the people we hear from are sharing their stories, hoping that their experiences will help us with our own health and wellbeing. Please be aware that some of their life experiences may touch on issues that are sensitive to some. Please listen with care. You will find information on seeking help if you need it in the notes attached to each episode.
When I hear the words footy and cricket, I think young blokes getting a good dose of healthy exercise and priceless social bonding. Dan Irwin certainly got all that as a teenager, but it also sent him on a long downward spiral into gambling. I caught up with Dan at the home he shares with his fiancé Sarah near Buninyong.
DI
I grew up in Macedon, Riddells Creek… area… and… went to primary school, high school all through there, was desperate to be a PE teacher didn't get enough… my marks weren't good enough, too busy playing sport in my later years ….and moved to… northern Victoria, up north of Shepparton to did a dairy apprenticeship… food science degree through Kraft at Strathmerton, and then played a lot of country footy. So, went to a few clubs played, and stayed within the dairy industry up north played till I was 37. It’s a big chunk of your life playing footy and training and doing all those things, and then when I finished footy got depression, which never spoke to anyone about. Adding that into a lifelong career of gambling it didn't put me in a great headspace so…
BM
The sport you were playing, was it related to the gambling? Did you have opportunities to get into gambling through footy?
DI
Yes…footy and cricket. So… I say back in Riddells Creek when I was 16, so back then we didn't have the iPads and everything else that was going… so what you wanted to do is play sports, senior sport to play with your… or your local heroes if you like, your local peers, so and I was sort of fairly gifted in the fact that I could play senior footy / cricket at 16. Cricket starts spring carnival time. My introduction to gambling was with the cricket team. I used to work in a sports store, local Gisborne sport stores, get my $20-25 I’d earn on a Friday night, to put in a punting pool on a Saturday.
BM
So you were 16- 17?
DI
16-17 yeah. I knew nothing about gambling but I just wanted to be part of this gambling pool and it…it seemed like so much fun, and that was my introduction to gambling. Move on a couple of years… was never committed enough or trained hard enough to play at a high… a really high level of footy… AFL footy but good enough to get paid a good supplementary wage in country Victoria, but all that that meant, they’d supplement your wage, and that extra money I’d just gamble with. Yeah, so binge drinking and binge gambling for a long part of my life, for probably 10-15 years was just the norm and I never saw it as a problem, thought everyone else did it.
BM
You thought and you scored, as well.
DI
Yeah, on a Saturday night to gamble $500 or $1000 and have 12-15 cans… it was not unusual at all, for a lot of us.
BM
You mentioned depression after you finished…
DI
Yeah…
BM
…playing sport. Did, did that influence…
DI
Yeah it did.
BM
…your gambling addiction?
DI
Yeah it did…it got bigger…So I gambled a lot more. When I was with…with… in groups gambling…mates and stuff, I never really did a lot of damage. Yes, it was gambling too much and drinking too much. But the big damage that I did after I retired, was gambling by myself then chasing losses and …having too much time on my hands. My whole lifestyle in a way, like you're used to this two nights a week training, seeing ya mates, playing on a Saturday, sometimes recovery session on Sunday to putting a complete halt on that, living in a town where I didn't have really any mates, and then became a hermit, myself. I look at that period of two or three years of the person I became from when I retired, till I actually started to get some help. I was terrible husband…
BM
So you had a family?
DI
Yeah, and that was probably the change too. So, I had… I was married, got married very young and we tried to have kids for a long time… through IVF and I feel for any couple that goes through IVF it’s a…
BM
Oh gosh that must be so hard
DI
…it’s a horrific rollercoaster of emotions and so much, on the female with the hormones and so forth. We sort of just drifted apart and… divorced and then I met my second wife and I went from just living a pretty much a single life existence to being divorced, remarried, having a four year old stepson, a daughter all within 12 months. So it was a massive life change for me, but I always thought ‘oh, that's what I was wanted. This is what I wanted’. And it just was too much, and but like I never would say that out loud to anybody, like I’m 195 centimetres… and 17 in stone and around country Victoria… who puts a hand up and says ‘oh, I'm in trouble. I need some help. I can't cope’. You just never said it, so you battle on and a couple of mates did sort of say ‘hey, what's going on?’ I just brushed them aside, you know. I'm just kind of under the pump with work and you just come up with excuses. You just make excuses to everything.
BM
What's happened to… you marriage during those years of gambling and your second marriage?
DI
Yeah…
BM
How did your family cope with that?
DI
Hard…that was with my ex-wife. Yeah, she, she thought I was having an affair… and so she was always suspicious about I was doing and then you're trying to hide the gambling, so hiding bets on the phone and putting… at the time I thought well, that's ridiculous. Since that sneakiness of hiding something… from your partner, the person you're supposed to be most upfront and honest with. So I don't think that helped. I was really moody through that time, would snap off like *snap of fingers*, do you know what I mean? It wasn't out on the coaster like you're drinking I had a six year old and a two year old, and we'd never spent time with them. There’s spending time… and then there’s spending time. Like just because you're in the same room, you know, you’re not spending time with your kids. Now it's like, do you know what I mean, it’s cost me many painted nails and faces with Mad…Maddison because that's what she wanted to do. So, you have to be in that moment but never did any of that prior to… while I was still gambling. Would always look at excuses not to go anywhere. Didn't want to go and visit friends or… spend time with… at that retired space that will, would have probably been the most important thing I could have done, is kept those friendships going… and didn't want to do any of that.
BM
Sports friendships?
DI
Yeah, the ones that are made through
BM
Yeah
DI
and…cricket and footy, when I retired from footy you don't because you don't see everyone, once, twice, three times a week, actually have to make the effort to go and see them. But yeah, never went to any old my team's games or… just didn't want to be involved at all.
BM
What decided you do to stop?
DI
Ah getting found out and getting…
BM
By your family?
DI
Yeah, so even then though I wasn't honest, didn’t, didn’t understand how much I lost. I was trying to still sugar-coat it…and then I …got sacked from a job. I wasn't doing what I was supposed, hired to do. So I was just on the phone gambling…
BM
Ok
DI
Saying I was going here, but I wasn't so…
BM
So you were pretty deep in?
DI
Yeah, absolutely yeah. I could of… if they had posed charges, like potentially… do you know what I mean? Like I could have gone to jail. At that time I had a choice to make. The gambling side of me would have packed up going ‘oh, this is all just too hard. I don't want to deal with it’, which is what I did for a majority of my life about dealing with… feelings… and … which a lot of us men do just don't want to talk about it, don't want to deal with it, and just say to move to either Queensland or Perth and got out of here, and never knew I had a daughter, but the counsellor I saw at St Albans she sort of said ‘yeah no you can't do that…dad da da’. She said ‘do your mates know?’ this is probably one big thing. I said ‘ah, nah, I don’t think so’. She said ‘you'd be surprised what they do know’. But I don’t… She goes I need you to… have… how many do you have? I said, I sorted… I said ‘oh I've got lots’ but we don't have lots of friends. We have lots of acquaintances, we’ll say ‘Oh hey how are you going?’ But friends are the people there when you're absolutely in the…dire but they're there they've got your back. I told one every day for five days and it was emotional like I bawled… through every time and it was those uncomfortable silences on the other end, *chuckles* cause I know their like ‘Oh hang on Dan’s crying, what’s going on here?’ but they all said… like a few of them said that… ‘oh, you’re a bloody dickhead…da da da…but we’re here for ya… whatever you need’. And like … one of them, probably my best mate, I moved into Bendigo with his family for six months because that's where I got a job… and they took me in for six months, which is amazing, didn't have to do that, but they did. That was the rock, rock bottom and slowly…pulled my way back. Probably for the first six months, I still had the wrong reasons for doing it. I was still saying if I fix, I can get my marriage back and get my family back, and it probably wasn't till I got a letter from… probably eight months later saying ‘nah I'm filing for divorce we’re done’ and I thought at that time I might go ‘oh bugger it, what’s the point? Might as well gamble again, no point in me doing it now’. But I didn't, I got this time my hands, I gotta do something different, whatever that may be and for me it was volunteering. So… and I really enjoy it, the potential to help someone. Through one of my Gamblers Help counsellors she put me on to… what is called Peer Connection and it's on the Gambler’s Help website. So your speaking to someone who's actually an ex gambler, and caller was Frank and I got the calls every Tuesday at eight o'clock, now I would be like at 7:30 waiting for his call. So, for the first six months, like he… he was probably the… one of the keys to giving me hope and getting back on track. When I went back to see my counsellor she suggested that I should look into… becoming a volunteer, in the peer clinic. I'm like who would want to listen to me, what I’ve got to say *chuckles*. … goodness me Right, I went through the process, and went through the training and a really nervous… the first few calls, what really… trouble with the silences. I felt like I just had to get something in there. I couldn't, I wasn't talking to someone. I'm trying to help him but there's this block of silence, like now I just know you just shut up, like this there's nothing wrong with that. And we used to do it at Heidelberg, so it used to be you go into Banyule Community Health and there'd be a shift and there'd be five or six of us, and I learned a lot off the other callers and some… you get such a vary… so I have a couple of ladies who have trouble with the pokies and live in country Victoria. They see it as a little bit of an outing for them. And then I have young blokes… trainees who are throwing away thousands of dollars on sports betting on the phone. So and I've done that for eight years now, but now it's become mobile. So I can take it …so I was in Murray Bridge for work in South Australia last week and I was able to take with what I had and do the calls from my motel in Murray Bridge, which just makes it so much more flexible and I still dial in, debrief with my supervisor which is protocol and just say was there any trouble? Was there anyone we should worry about? Which is rarely the case and then the second part of that was becoming a ReSPIN speaker. So getting out, and telling my story. I really enjoy that and, and I'm starting to do some local stuff too.
I’m good now but, but for the first two years you still have thoughts of what if’s…you know… what if I stopped here. That sort of takes… that… two years I think, can't do anything about yesterday. It's gone. You want to have a really bad day and hey today’s a new day, and for a long time I used to think people who talk like that, oh supreme optimists give ya the shits though, that sort of stuff but you can’t… it’s so true. You cannot do anything about yesterday, and you really can't do anything about tomorrow, you can prepare for tomorrow. So having that, and getting that sort of mantra of ‘okay, yep, I made some really poor decisions over a… 15 year period in there, that I'm not proud of it all, but I know I can be a good husband soon… and, and I know I’m a good dad’ now so…
BM
Really took responsibility for what was happening to you.
DI
And it, it was Maddie was my motivation, my daughter. Those pictures all up there, that’s her latest school one there. Yeah, she was, she was definitely my motivation to do it. And then obviously meeting Sarah, like, I remember we met online… I'd been on… one other date, and it was just a disaster… thought why am I doing this. And we started talking and we were chatting away and then Sarah asked, ‘What happened to your marriage?’ and we hadn't met each other at that stage, we had only ever talked online and I just said ‘Yeah, I have a gambling problem. I lost thousands and thousands of dollars blah, blah, blah’. And I hadn’t thought about it for a while, but then since, then I was waiting for the return and eventually she came back and said ‘Well, that wasn’t the answer I was expecting’ and we just kept chatting from there. So, yeah, she knows all about… what I do and I think having that open… mostly with her, like I do my calls, Peer Connection calls in there and she’ll ask how's everybody and obviously not cross… crossing client confidentiality, but she's just genuinely interested in my talks or always interested in how I go. My daughter calls it my other job. Because I think for so long… when you have that addic…, and I'm sure it's similar for other addictions, but you hide it for so long and it's not a period of time I’m proud of. But it's a period of time that I can… resource and hopefully… if I can help some others not get to the depths that I did.
BM
What would you tell? Young… it's usually boys
DI
Yep
BM
…who… are in that situation now? What kind of advice would you have to them?
DI
Don't have to gamble to be in that group. Absolutely we want to be part of that, and part of the… and I think it's really important that the leaders of the club and the peers of the club, that they get on board, because I can go and tell that message, and I say Dan, he was an ex footballer, he speaks with…blah blah blah but if their captain who's played 150 games, loved by the club, loved by the young kids, gets up and says roughly the same message… well, they're gonna get a lot more out of him saying than message than me.
BM
Anything else to say?
DI
Yeah…Look at any, any guy, anyone, whether it's male or female…. Don't be afraid to ask for help or tell your friends of the story… or anything your going with… they’re friends for a reason. They love ya… and you might think it's really bad and they're gonna react badly but… but just be open, honest and ask for help, and I always say to the other people too tell you that if someone actually chooses you, that you're the one that they trust the most. You're the one that they're going too confined in, or you're just as important as that, because you're going to… whatever you're doing, give them your time and just sit and listen. You won't have to say anything. You won't have to give them the great advice. But let them… and be in that present moment. So always say to them if you're that chosen one, if you like, make sure you give them that time, they’ve probably been thinking about telling you for weeks and weeks and weeks and build this up into something that's… so important for them. You have to give the right thing, do the right thing for them. So important just to talk when you're struggling, I think. My life now is so stress free, like it's the stress of gambling is amazing, like when you stop gambling and… and your, your shoulders just go from here and you go hang on I feel much better and I know my mates have said over the time, how much would a different person I am now, back to the person they meet years, and years ago.
BM
Thank you so much for sharing with me.
DI
Thank you.
BM
Your story is very inspiring.
DI
Thank you for coming down, appreciate telling my story and a pleasure to meet you.
BM
That was Dan Irwin from Buninyong.
You will find us always contact numbers and details in the notes attached to this episode. And while you're at it, please give us a star rating. We'd also love to hear your comments and suggestions. Our Facebook and Twitter details are in the notes. Until next have a healthy life won’t you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai edited by WWHS Health Promotion Team.
