Hong Kong’s English-speaking professional community has a specific problem: excellent medical provision, and very little of it in English at the level of depth this work requires.
For the expatriate and internationally educated population in finance, law and the professions, that gap matters more than it sounds. Psychological work happens in language. Conducting it in a second language, or through a clinician whose English is functional rather than fluent, produces sessions that are polite, articulate and largely ineffective, because the material is being translated before it can be felt.
Add that the professional community is small and interconnected, and that the hours leave almost no room, and the ordinary outcome is that nothing happens for years.
The professional population
For the international finance, legal and professional community there is the additional problem that visible difficulty carries a career cost, in an environment where hours are long and drinking is structural. Eating disorders and alcohol travel together far more often than they are treated together.
Working from outside
Specialist provision in Hong Kong is limited, particularly in English and particularly for adults. And the professional community is small enough that local treatment is not reliably private.
A clinician in London solves both. Nothing is held in Hong Kong, there is no waiting room, and no chance of overlap with your own professional world. Hong Kong is seven or eight hours ahead depending on the season, which makes London mornings and Hong Kong evenings the natural slot.
The clinical position
UKCP-registered psychotherapist and Jungian analyst, HCPC-registered art psychotherapist, doctorate on male eating disorders, twenty-five years of practice, and a specialism in the overlap between eating disorders and addiction.
Frequency is usually once to three times a week at the beginning and reduces as things steady. Why, and what that looks like.
Dr Philippe Jacquet is a UKCP registered psychotherapist, a Jungian analyst and an HCPC registered art psychotherapist, with twenty-five years of clinical practice. His Doctorate of Professional Practice at the University of Essex examined male eating disorders from the perspective of analytical psychology. Registration can be checked on either public register.
How the work is delivered from here
All international sessions are by secure video, in English or French. Online therapy is not a reduced version of consulting room work: it is the format that lets weekly work survive living abroad, travelling, or relocating. Sessions run in United Kingdom hours, which suits most regions, and if your time zone makes none of it workable, say so when you enquire rather than assuming it rules you out.
For clinicians and treatment services
Dr Jacquet supervises clinical teams in private residential addiction treatment and in a private psychiatric hospital. For treatment centres, psychiatric units and group practices looking for external clinical supervision, including in places where no supervisor of this seniority is available locally, team supervision is also delivered by video. For individual practitioners, see clinical supervision.
Common questions
Is online treatment effective for an eating disorder?
For the psychological work, yes. What matters is frequency and continuity. Where physical health needs monitoring, that requires a local doctor alongside, and I will say so plainly.
My family knows and it has made things worse. Can that be part of the work?
Usually it has to be. Being watched, questioned and argued with is one of the most common reasons these disorders entrench rather than ease, and it is rarely anybody's fault. It is what happens when a family can see a problem and has no idea what to do with it.
Is it confidential from my employer?
Nothing is disclosed to any employer or insurer without your consent, save for the narrow legal and safeguarding limits every registered practitioner is bound by, which are explained at the outset, and online sessions leave no local footprint.