A WAVE of dizziness floods over you as exhaustion leeches away at your concentration, your feet and knees aching, back hunched, hands covered in cuts and burns and shaking from the tiredness.

Long after midnight, you finally stagger out, dehydrated from a lack of water, past the point of hunger, to head to a bar and let 15 draining hours at the coalface melt away.

This is the life many chefs enter as young apprentices in their teens, fast discovering just how much of a nightmare a kitchen can be.

“The hours are, not unreasonable, sort of unsustainable ... unsociable,” Mal Meiers, a chef at Sydney’s Bennelong, tells news.com.au as he contemplates the pressures of restaurant work.

“All my schoolfriends would be out at weekends, working Monday to Friday 9-5, with weekends off. I’d often be working long nights and weekends. It can be quite isolating, especially if your restaurant isn’t a good fit.”

Chefs like Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White have forged careers through melodramatic recreations of the famously brutal restaurant world for entertainment. And while their hellish reality contests are something of a parody of uber-macho days gone by, the reality is still shockingly grim.

The suicides of high-profile chefs in Australia this year alone show how cutthroat the business can be.

In June, celebrity chef Darren Simpson died after a long battle with alcohol addiction-related illness. The father of two, who regularly appeared on cooking shows including Sunrise and Ready, Steady, Cook, suffered a heart attack shortly after a rehabilitation attempt near his Byron Bay home.

Jeremy Strode, 53, a hatted chef at Bistrode CBD in Sydney and an ambassador for RUOK, took his life a month later. “That all happened when I was overseas,” says Meiers, 31. “It stirred up feelings of losing Nitai.

“You don’t expect guys like that who’ve come out the other end and lived with it for so long to take their lives. I was just numb for three or four days.”

‘I’VE DONE SHIFTS WITH A BROKEN HAND’

There’s a popular phrase in kitchens that youngsters internalise early: “Push on, chef.”

The brusque mantra reflects the macho, military-style culture where strict discipline is enforced and showing weakness discouraged.

“It’s sort of a ‘get on with it’ attitude chefs have,” says Mr Meiers, 31. “Unless you’re dying or need to go to hospital, you get on with it. I’ve done shifts with a broken hand.

“They break you down and put you back together — but sometimes they don’t put you back together.”

Four years ago, Mr Meiers himself was “in a really dark place” and contemplating suicide.

“I was lucky to have a support network,” said the chef, who now runs Food For Thought, a regular charity event for mental health that made just under $26,000 this year.

“I called my best friend and started a conversation. It was hard. It’s not that you think people won’t care, you’re worried about the way you’ll be perceived. A million things run through your head.

“I just lucky that day wasn’t my day. From there, I started talking to people and getting myself right.”

Former Hilton Adelaide chef Simon Bryant told news.com.au: “People tend to blow up during service, it’s not uncommon for a chef to walk and not come back after.

“The pressure can trigger others behaviours. People when they’ve done a day’s work and it’s been long day and they’ve done service, which can be like a battlefield, they don’t have the tools to deal with it in a healthy way. It’s very common for chefs to go to a bar after.

“Most chefs pride themselves on their resilience, [they’re] really proud of how they handle pressure and thrive on it. That can be a great thing, but it can tip over and make you anxious.

“A chef will say, come on, throw another 20 hours at me, but there needs to be a point where you know you’ve had enough.

“Most kitchens are the United Nations — everyone’s accepted, but they’re tough. The girls are tough, too. You’ve got to find balance.

“We’ve lost amazing chefs and incredible people in the last few years.”

‘DIZZY SPELLS YOU PUSH THROUGH’

Jamie Wright, 33, who became a chef on the Gold Coast eight years ago, said the job sounded “exciting and fun”, but the 60 or 70-plus hours a week “really took its toll”. He said working in a high-end kitchen in his 20s was “like going to war every day,” with the more experienced chef ignoring new kids and leaving them to work things out alone.

“Your mind was too busy to drink or eat,” he told news.com.au. “Dizzy spells you push through even when you start shaking and feel the anxiety creeping in. Your legs and knees ache from standing up in confined spaces all day.

“You say you want to go to the toilet, and hours pass. You say you want something to eat and the same thing happens.

“I had a bit of a nervous breakdown, I wasn’t looking after myself.”

He said he worked with “egotistical assholes” and colleagues who left him in the lurch after drunken nights out. “There’s always that dominant person in the kitchen, usually the head chef. I’ve worked with those who fly off the handle, never happy with what everyone’s done. It’s the heat in the kitchen, the intensity ... I’ve never met a chef who doesn’t have a problem with alcohol., drug issues, prescription drug issues — it seems to help them through the week.

“I’ve struggled with alcohol in the past. You get together after work but then it’s five days in a row. It’s a big issue in the kitchen, it plays on your performance.”

TV chef Matt Moran and My Kitchen Rules star Colin Fassnidge have both called on the “high-pressure” restaurant industry to better support chefs, comparing its problems around suicide, divorce and drug and alcohol abuse with the medical industry.

“There are still way to many people suffering in silence,” says Mr Meiers, who is running Food For Thought events in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

He says kitchens have improved, and that Australian kitchens are far less aggressive than those in London. A recent Guardian article spoke of the city’s chefs working up to 90-hour weeks and being abused with hot tongs, with 78 per cent saying they’d had an accident or near miss through fatigue, 56 per cent using alcohol or painkillers to get through a shift and 51 per cent saying they had suffered from depression due to overwork.

But Mr Meiers says Australia’s surge to be a culinary world-leader “pushing the envelope” and competing with the like of Paris and Copenhagen has increased expectations. “Those pressures go all the way down,” he said.

‘IT’S HARD TO KNOW WHEN TO STOP’

A recent news.com.au series on Australia’s workplace mental health crisis found that risk factors for work-related suicide included job insecurity, isolation thanks to unsociable hours, a macho culture or lack of openness about mental health, bullying and high-intensity and low control environments. Most of these could apply to chefs.

Eight Australians die by their own hand each day, and 20 per cent of suicides are linked to work. Some restaurant businesses such as Merivale are now holding regular classes on spotting and handling mental health to try to tackle the issue.

Mr Bryant, who appeared with Maggie Beer in The Cook & The Chef, says people in the industry need to make sure their work isn’t their life.

“I don’t want to say it’s masochistic ... when you’re obsessed about your career choice, it’s hard to know when to stop,” he said.

“It’s incredibly important to have friends not involved in the industry, because they just say, ‘what are you talking about?’

“If you’re so invested in work that when it goes wrong, or you have a bad service or a bad review, your life crumbles ... it destroys your world. I don’t think that’s healthy.”

He said senior chefs could take the opportunity to ask how younger employees are at the start of the day, which is often the only chance there is.

“Especially for younger staff, it’s a big change culturally to come into a kitchen,” he said. “We’ve got older people assigned as mentors, it’s really important to help them work through the challenges.

“We’re always going to be in that situation where we’re delivering at very thin margins and the owner is under pressure.

“When you ask people how they are, really ask how they are.”

If you or someone you know needs help, please contact Lifeline on 13 11 14.

emma.reynolds@news.com.au | @emmareyn