Video Transcription
NRL Star Dane Gagai Shares His Mental Health Story
Dane Gagai puts the foot down. Still going, Gagai! And that is just brilliant, but brilliant defense equally for Canberra.
I grew up in Mackay. I was there my whole life until about the age of 15. It was good ’cause we lived on the coast, so go down to the beach, play a bit of touch footy down there, just run a bit of amok as a kid. We’re Torres Strait Islanders from Badu Island and Yam Island, and my mum moved over from New Zealand, from Papatowai. It’s a bit of a mix, part Kiwi, part T.I., two very strong cultural backgrounds.
[Announcer] Big chance coming up, it’s knocked by Carter. Gagai! Dane Gagai spotted an opening, he goes through.
When I was let go from the Broncos, that was a pretty tough period for me. There was a time where I was just kind of house hopping for a bit, and just playing Queensland Cup, and I’m just trying to get a start, and there was one particular night where I didn’t have a place to stay, so I parked my car down the street and just ended up pulling the seat back and just shut it down there, and that was probably the lowest point.
After we’d finished playing the next morning, Wayne Bennett gave me a call and I’d been in negotiations with him to come to Newcastle, and then he just gave me a call and goes, “Look, would you be ready to play next weekend if I got you down here?” And I couldn’t have been any more happy with that phone call. Wayne really helped me, I guess, develop me as my own person and took a lot of interest in me away from footy.
He believed I had, like, a lot of potential and natural ability, but he wanted to help get the stuff away from footy sorted, and I guess help me grow up. And he made the decision before I even knew about it, he had sat down and spoke with Alex McKinnon, and when I moved down here, Wayne put me in with him, and I learned a lot of things from Macca growing up, living with him, and just learned like, right from wrong sort of.
And I was obviously one of those people that didn’t want to talk about things and kind of just kept it to myself, and then when I was around people, I just put on a, I guess you could say, put on a mask and pretend like everything was all good. And when I was going through that tough period, I was pushing people away, and being Indigenous, I didn’t want my family to worry or anything like that. Didn’t want to, I guess, be seen as weak, and I thought I could fix it myself.
But the longer I held on to that stuff that happened with me, the worse things started getting. But as soon as I got put in the right environment and around the right people, and I spoke to it, spoke about it, it felt like a big weight was lifted off me, and I felt a lot better talking about it, having good sleep, getting a better routine in my life and minimizing, I guess, those things you stress about. If you can keep them to a minimal, that goes a long way to helping out mentally.
(teammate chatter)
Yarn Safe and Headspace is definitely the first thing you should do if you’re in a bad way. But if you’ve got somebody you can talk to, talk to ’em and just try to seek help.
Video by headspace
