On the day that would represent rock bottom for Dayne Beams – and start the gradual road back to recovery – he felt powerless to escape the addiction that had taken hold of his life. In a brave and confronting interview, he opened up to Jon Ralph and Glenn McFarlane on his darkest days, his crippling addictions and the road to recovery.
It was February 13 this year, and Beams was about to drive his car into a Donvale power pole in a self-described “cry for help”, leading to the rehab stint that might have saved his life.
Three weeks in a Wollongong rehab centre the previous season had helped cure his gambling addiction and sparked an unlikely passion for art that has now become his career.
But the grip of a painkilling addiction already humming away in the background immediately leapt into overdrive.
One of footy’s most dominant players had achieved a glittering AFL resume – the 2010 premiership, an All Australian jumper and the reverence of his peers as an AFL captain.
But working away in his Bayswater factory on an indefinite break from Collingwood, he was numb to the pain and powerless to find answers about how he could drag his life back to the brink.
“When I crashed my car, that was the lowest. That day was the last time I took drugs,” Beams tells the Sacked podcast.
“It was a cry for help and I know people would say you could have done it in a lot of other ways but if I was trying to harm myself I would have driven a lot quicker.
“It sounds stupid but in that situation I felt like I had tried to do a lot of other things and they weren’t working for me. So I didn’t know what to do any more.
“I remember the lead-up to it, I was just here (at the Health of Mind Art) factory and I was just sick of what I was doing. I was sick of it because I couldn’t stop it because the addiction had taken over it and had got a grip.
“People will say you should have got help but in those circumstances and that point in time it’s what I felt like I needed to do.”
Eight months on from that dramatic self-styled intervention, Beams is finally ready to tell all of his story.
For years there have been rumours and innuendo and WhatsApp versions of his indiscretions flying around cyberspace.
And don’t worry, he’s heard them all.
But finally clean of those twin addictions and aware of his unlikely responsibility to inspire people going through similar issues, he is ready to talk.
He is happy to admit the “addictive issues” that have long been hinted at are the gambling and painkilling addiction that he has spent years defeating.
And his hope is that he might help remove some of the stigmas associated with his illness given the growing number of fellow sufferers who seek him out for help.
“From that day it’s been really good. I can sit here and confidently say I will never gamble again and I will never take a drug again,” he said.
“The amount of shit I have put my family through has been just bloody terrible and I so I will never do it again. It’s done, but what is important now is that I have learned from it.
“I spent the next week or two in at the Camberwell Epworth mental health facility there, so I have actually had a couple of stints in rehab.
“The initial few days of a withdrawal process is the worst, so they can give you some medical help with that, to get you through it.
“And once you are through it, it becomes a psychological battle. I have a monthly appointment now with an addiction specialist, so we check in every month to chat about things and as well I still get therapy twice a week.
“I have got a therapist now I am comfortable with.
“I am still medicated, I still take my antidepressants. A lot of people are right against them but they have worked for me and they continue to keep me stable and I have got no issues with taking them.
“I have got a really good treatment program and some days you don’t feel like getting up but I always push myself to do it and once you do it, you feel better for it.”
BEAMS AND HIS FATHER PHIL
The death of Philip Beams in February 2018 was the life-changing event that would rock his son’s world and eventually help curtail a career that only this week officially came to an end.
Beams had left Collingwood at the end of 2014 to be with his father – then in remission from bowel cancer – in a period he describes as the best four years of his life.
But in the countless hours he has spent in counselling and neuropsychological testing he has come to realise amid all that love there was also an element of trauma.
It is why he has now come to understand why his father’s death was so inextricably linked to his loss of passion for the game.
All of it combined with mental health issues that had started in his time at Collingwood and eventually led to his complete breakdown.
“It started as a kid. I don’t know what it was, I was just obsessed with my old man,” says Beams.
“Mum and dad divorced when I was five and I have three other siblings, but it was just different. When they divorced you go through who gets the kids but what I do remember is I wanted to be with dad.
“A lot of my problems that have arisen over the last three or four years on reflection have come from the amount that I wanted to be with dad, and I guess the emotional deprivation around that.
“Dad didn’t deal with the divorce that well and there was a lot of stuff mum was rightly holding me back from initially, so I would see dad every second weekend.
“I don’t remember the weekends, I can remember having to go back to mums and I would be a mess. I would always cry and those sort of moments for a kid become quite traumatic.”
By the start of high school he was allowed to live with his father in Southport, so desperate to be around him he would catch a bus an hour to his school in Palm Beach.
“Dad just got me and I got him and we did everything together.”
In that perfect 2015-17 window Philip would arrive at Beams’ house and they would drive into the Gabba for home games.
“When we got to the game he would go right to go to the pub on the corner, the Aussie Nash (Australian National Hotel) and I would go left to go to the rooms and at the end of the game we would meet back where we left. He would be full …
“He would want to talk about footy the whole way back or he would fall asleep in the passenger side, and it was just then when I was driving to games after he passed I would find myself looking at the passenger seat and it was just emotionally draining going to games, it just didn’t feel right.”
THE BREAKDOWN
Beams father was given three years to live when his cancer re-emerged in late 2017 but was dead by February 2018.
In Round 3 of the 2018 season, Beams’ emotions finally came flooding out.
“I had the family there for the 150th game and I just lost it. That was the first time it happened,” he says.
“That was when it was really in my face and confronting. I didn’t know what was going on, I just had a meltdown, a complete meltdown.
“I couldn’t stop crying for two hours, I had no idea what was really happening to me and I called (football boss) David Noble into the room and he sat with me for 90 minutes until mum got there.”
The club’s captain was sent home under the excuse of injury and arrived back in Brisbane to find his team had lost by only five points.
“That made me feel even worse”.
It was the start of a 16-week period where he would turn to gambling and painkillers to attempt to erase the pain and confusion he felt.
On the morning of matches he would go for his routine walk and “that’s when I would let it all out”.
“I would cry and not want to play,” he says.
“I still managed to play some really good footy, I honestly don’t know how I did it. I didn’t want to play and you have to be up for it emotionally and be charged to go. I was drained so it was difficult.“
THE ADDICTIONS
Beams began seeking expert care for his mental health while balancing a tightrope of amazing football while abusing painkillers with a gambling issue that grew in scope.
As a kid he had been a social gambler since the age of 16 when he went to dad’s cricket games with the races a permanent Saturday afternoon fixture in the background.
Now those vices became an escape from his pain.
“With me I was trying to deal with some stuff I didn’t really want to be dealing with,” he says.
“I have dealt with it now and I am able to deal with it now and I was just doing anything I could to avoid it then.
“That’s all it was, a mechanism to numb pain and forget about everything that was going on, and it ends up getting a real grip on you.
“As a footballer I had a lot of surgeries and I never abused (painkilling tablets). They had been prescribed and I needed them for pain, but now I had stashes of them and they were just sitting up in the cupboard and it just ends up controlling your life. It really does and as a result of that your mental health deteriorates.
“Once you stop you have got a whole lot of work to do to get yourself back on track and I see it – I struggled with two things, gambling and the prescription painkillers, and the hardest thing to break was the actual prescription drugs.
“They actually cause a change in your brain, the chemistry in your brain.“
Last year after nine games with the Pies up until Round 11 he checked into the Wollongong clinic as his addictions flared again.
“It was really then that I stopped gambling and I haven’t gambled now for 16 months, it’s been a long time since I had a bet but once that stopped the other thing took over,” he says.
“You replace one addictive behaviour with another and that’s what a lot of people do. It stopped then the drugs started happening.
“That was ten times harder to stop because your body goes into withdrawal and your brain tells you if you don’t have this drug you are going to die. It becomes life or death, that’s what it feels like.”
As well as his meetings with an addiction specialist Beams has self-excluded himself from every sports betting agency which means they are legally prevented from taking his bets.
Thankfully, he says, he got out before he lost everything.
“I am lucky I still own my house, didn’t get to the stage where I had to sell everything, I am lucky in that way but it took over for me. And it can sneak up on you,” he says.
“I haven’t really given too much thought (about the total amount I lost). I have lost a lot, I know that, but I didn’t have to go into things like selling my house or selling things to pay for things, I didn’t have to do that, because there are a lot of bloody people out there who lose everything.
“For so many people out there it’s an issue and not to say there are issues at Collingwood but you can see certain players who will not go down the right path if they don’t get advice soon.
“I imagine it is going on at every club. There are so many betting agencies, it is so easy to put a bet on.
“I have put things in place now and I won’t do it but feel confident that I could walk into a TAB or go to the races and I wouldn’t bet.”
THE RECOVERY
DAYNE Beams has heard every rumour.
He has received every crazy screenshot WhatsApp theory dressed up as fact.
Like the utterly false one about Eddie McGuire paying off his gambling debts which did the rounds for months.
Finally he can truly laugh them off because he doesn’t have to acknowledge the element of truth that lay within them.
“The amount of rumours I have heard about me … Man. I don’t think I heard one that was true,” he says.
“Yeah, I had a gambling problem so the gist of the story was on the money but the rumours were all laughable.
“They all hurt a bit because they kept getting fed back to me by people I care about. And you want them to stop, but at the time I wasn’t ready to talk about the problems I was having like I am now.”
WINNING THE BATTLE
One of the slogans on the Health of Mind Art clothing line – of which a portion goes to the Lance Picioane’s Love Me Love You Foundation – is “Win the Morning, Win the Day”.
Beams now gets up early to kickstart his day and does it free of worry and guilt.
He can look his wife Kelly and children Carter and Ruby in the eye again knowing he will not let them down.
“It is honestly the best thing, when you are caught up in these things you don’t feel emotions. You really struggle to feel anything,” he says.
“For me as shit as it is, I missed a year of my kids and interacting with them and feeling the love I feel for them
“I guess now when I am interacting with my children, it’s the best thing knowing my mind is not occupied by anything else but them
“When you’re caught up in addictions they become your number one priority and as shit as that sounds, that is just the way it is. Your energy and focus becomes on where am I getting that next packet from, how am I putting that next bet on, who I am borrowing money from.
“It’s just a shit way to live.”
Beams’ art studio: www.healthofmindart.com/
Instagram@healthofmindart
A portion of the profits of his art and clothing line goes to www.lovemeloveyou.org.au