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Trevor knew his drinking was killing him. At the time, he didn’t care
By Henrietta Cook and Aisha Dow
Deaths caused by excessive drinking have reached their highest rate in a decade, as strained hospitals struggle to keep up with alcohol-related presentations and frontline workers report worsening violence.
The situation has prompted an alliance of health organisations to call on the federal government to protect Australians from alcohol marketing and introduce greater taxes on cheap wine.
In 2015, Trevor Royals was diagnosed with pancreatitis caused by high-level alcohol consumption. He has since turned his life around and is pictured here with his youngest daughter Anna, 21.Credit: Eddie Jim
“Alcohol is causing a lot of harm,” said Hannah Pierce, the executive officer of Alcohol Change Australia.
“It impacts all Australians, whether that is family, friends or colleagues who are drinking or going out at night and experiencing alcohol-fuelled incidents.”
A new report by Alcohol Change Australia, which is made up of members from organisations including Cancer Council Australia and the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, reveals that there were 1742 alcohol-induced deaths in Australia in 2022 — 164 more than the year before.
These deaths were caused by conditions including alcoholic liver cirrhosis and alcohol poisoning.
Many Australians continue to drink at risky levels. There were more than 106,000 hospitalisations for injuries, cancer and chronic conditions attributed to alcohol in 2020.
“We are seeing people coming (in) every day with alcohol-related presentations,” one emergency department physician said in the report, which concluded that little progress had been made to curb alcohol-related harm since the federal government launched its national alcohol strategy four years ago.
“It used to mainly be the weekends, but now it’s every day.”
Melbourne father-of-two Trevor Royals was admitted to hospital eight times in two years after he developed pancreatitis due to excessive alcohol consumption.
Trevor Royals would like to see more support provided to patients when the leave rehab. Credit: Eddie Jim
“I knew I was killing myself, but I didn’t care,” the 56-year-old recalled.
For many decades, Royals kept his alcoholism a secret.
He held senior and demanding jobs in human resources for major companies, slipping off to the pub at lunch and after work where he would down pint after pint of beer.
When Royals’ alcoholism was at its worst, he quit his job and spent his days at the family home in Alphington, in Melbourne’s north where he would drink a bottle of vodka a day.
“My daughters witnessed their father slowly disintegrate,” he said.
“I remember my eldest daughter coming home from school and looking for the vodka bottles I’d hidden. She’d put them in the bin and look at me with this sad expression.”
Royals grew up in a middle-class family and started drinking regularly at university and when he joined the local football team.
“If you were the best player on the ground, they would give you a free beer,” he said. “At one club, I was asked to get down on one knee and suddenly a funnel appeared, and I’d have to skol the beer.”
The then promising young athlete remembers going on an end-of-season football trip with his team to Adelaide when he was 19 and drinking alcohol at breakfast, lunch and dinner.
He said undiagnosed anxiety and a traumatic experience of workplace bullying during his 30s tipped him into alcoholism.
He has been sober for six years now, following numerous stints in rehab, but is living with health complications caused by his past drinking. This includes type 1 diabetes caused by the removal of half his pancreas.
He’d like to see better support provided to patients when they are discharged from rehab, such as access to careers counsellors. “This would equip them to move on with their lives with a sense of purpose,” he said.
The dark side of alcohol is also increasingly being felt by those working on the frontline, according to a separate report from the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine.
In its 2022 survey of 1284 people in Australia and New Zealand, more than 68 per cent of doctors, nurses and other emergency department staff said incidents of alcohol-related violence had worsened in their emergency departments in recent years.
“Alcohol is definitely the most commonly consumed harmful drug in Australia,” said Associate Professor Mark Putland, the Victorian faculty head of the emergency medicine college.
“There’s no question we’ve got a big methamphetamine problem in Australia at the moment, and I’d love to see it gone, but alcohol is still a bigger problem.”
Almost 90 per cent of emergency department staff reported to the survey that they were made to feel unsafe because of alcohol-impacted patients, a problem Putland said was especially unwelcome as health systems around the world struggled to recruit and retain enough workers.
“At the most extreme end, there is direct physical harm, people violently assaulting healthcare workers. But what people need to realise is that’s the tip of the iceberg. There is an iceberg of other harm … verbal abuse, aggressive behaviour… destruction of property.”
Federal Health Minister Mark Butler said the government was providing more than $870 million over four years to support drug and alcohol treatment services and prevention, research and communication activities.
He said while the proportion of Australians who drank alcohol at risky levels last financial year (31 per cent) had not changed significantly since 2019, other indicators showed that harmful alcohol use was on the decline.
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