Most people who come to me about addiction have stopped before. Often many times. The question is rarely how to stop. It is how to build a life in which the drinking, the using or the behaviour is no longer needed.
I work with clients across Ireland online, by secure video.
What the Irish figures actually show
The 2025 Healthy Ireland Survey found that 71% of people aged fifteen and over had drunk alcohol in the previous twelve months, and that 36% scored as hazardous or harmful drinkers on the AUDIT-C screening tool. About 1% scored twenty or more on the full AUDIT, the range that indicates probable dependence.
Average consumption for everyone aged fifteen and over was 9.9 litres of pure alcohol in 2023. That is roughly four hundred pints of beer, or a hundred and four bottles of wine, per person per year, including everyone who does not drink at all.
Two things in that data are worth pausing on.
The overall trend is down. Hazardous drinking has fallen from 41% in 2015 to 36% in 2025. Irish drinking is not what it was, and the story that everyone tells about Ireland and alcohol is a decade out of date.
One group is going the other way. Among women aged fifteen to twenty-four, hazardous drinking rose from 31% to 39% over the same period, while everyone else improved. That is the only group moving in the wrong direction, and it is not the group the national conversation is about.
Why this is harder to see in Ireland than elsewhere
A functioning drinker is difficult to identify anywhere. It is harder in a culture where the amount you are drinking looks unremarkable against the people around you.
If seventy per cent of the adults you know drink, and a third of them are drinking at a level that would register on a screening tool, then your own consumption has plenty of company. Nothing has visibly gone wrong. The work still gets done. Nobody has said anything. The comparison group is the problem.
What tends to happen is that the drinking is holding something together rather than pulling something apart, and it holds until it does not. By the time it slips, a great deal has usually been arranged around keeping it in place.
“I don’t drink every day”
This is the most common sentence in the room, and it is almost always offered as evidence that there is no problem. It is not evidence of anything.
Frequency is not the test. There is chronic drinking, where alcohol is in every day and has become part of the structure of a life, so woven into it that stopping would mean rebuilding the day itself. And there is binge drinking, where nothing happens for a week and then one night ends in an accident, in A&E, or in something that has to be explained the following morning.
If you drink every Saturday and it is making a mess of your life, you have a problem with alcohol. The calendar is not the diagnosis. The consequences are.
The functioning drinker belongs inside the first group rather than beside it. Functioning is a phase, not a type, and it does not last.
There is nowhere that is automatically safe
This is the real difference between alcohol and everything else I treat.
If someone is using cocaine, heroin or crack and they go home to their family, they are safe. Whatever else is difficult in that house, the drug is not in it. There is a door they can close.
With alcohol there is no such door. It is in the kitchen. It is at the dinner, the wedding, the funeral, the work event, in the hand of the person sitting opposite. There is no room you can walk into knowing you will not have to make a decision.
In Ireland and in Britain it goes further than availability. People call the pub my local. Not my gym, not my supermarket. It is the only building we make possessive, and that possessive is the point: it is not a shop, it is somewhere you belong. Ask someone to stop drinking and you are often asking them to stop belonging, which is a much larger request than it sounds.
Most invincible when least able
The moment a person is at their most vulnerable, slowed, impaired, unable to read a room or defend themselves, is the moment they feel most invincible.
That inversion is where the damage happens. It is why people drive. It is why an argument becomes a fight. It is why assaults at the weekend so often happen to somebody under the influence, who was, to anyone looking for an easy target, the easiest person on the street.
None of those decisions are made by someone who feels impaired. They are made by someone who feels fine.
Jung, and a letter written twenty-nine years late
In 1931 a man named Rowland Hazard came to Carl Jung about his drinking. Jung worked with him and then told him something a clinician rarely says: that medicine and psychiatry could do nothing further, and that his only remaining hope was a vital spiritual experience.
That admission of failure is, indirectly, where Alcoholics Anonymous comes from. Rowland carried it to the Oxford Group, it reached Ebby Thacher, and through him Bill Wilson.
Twenty-nine years later, in January 1961, Wilson wrote to Jung to tell him what that remark had set in motion. Jung answered within the week. Alcohol in Latin is spiritus, he pointed out, the same word used for the highest religious experience and for the most depraving poison. Spiritus contra spiritum. The craving, he thought, was “the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness”.
I am a Jungian analyst who works in addiction, so I am not neutral about that letter. But the clinical use of it has nothing to do with religion. It says that the drinking is answering a real question, and that taking the answer away without addressing the question is not treatment.
Intensity has to go somewhere
An addiction is an intense relationship. Removing the alcohol does not remove the appetite for intensity, and if nothing is done about that appetite it simply finds a new object.
Most often it is work. Frequently it is sugar and food, which is how a great many people leave a drinking problem and arrive at an eating disorder without ever noticing the handover. Alcohol is liquid sugar, and for men in particular the two are often the same mechanism wearing different clothes.
This is why I do not treat stopping as the goal. Stopping is the beginning of the question, not the answer to it.
Ireland treats addiction well. That is not the gap.
I am not going to pretend Irish addiction services are poor. There are very good addiction counsellors in Ireland, and there is a strong recovery culture.
The gap is elsewhere. Addiction, trauma and eating disorders are usually one psychological profile presenting in three directions rather than three separate problems that happen to coincide. Someone arrives about their drinking, and underneath it is a relationship with food that nobody has asked about, and underneath that is something that happened long before either. Add the anxiety and the depression that travel with all of it.
You can find clinicians in Ireland who work with each of those. If you arrive with the full package, you will struggle to find one person who can follow you through the whole of it.
That is my specialism: the complex case, complex PTSD, where addiction and often an eating disorder sit in the same person.
What I bring to it
I trained in addiction at the Hazelden Foundation. I spent close to a decade working inside residential treatment, and I continue to supervise clinicians who work in it. So I know what residential care does well and where its limits are.
If residential treatment is the right step for you, I will say so plainly. If it is not, or if you cannot step out of your life for a month without cost, intensive one to one work is the same clinical depth delivered privately.
I came to this work through my own recovery from addiction and an eating disorder. That taught me two things I have never found in a textbook: how convincing the mind can be when it is defending the very thing destroying you, and that recovery is not the removal of a behaviour but the slow business of finding somewhere else for the feeling to go.
Anonymity, which matters more here
Ireland is a small island and everybody knows everybody. If you see an addiction counsellor in Dublin, there is a reasonable chance they know somebody you know, or that somebody in the room at a meeting does.
For some people that is exactly why they look outside Ireland. I have written about why, and what taught me the lesson, on the EMDR page.
When medical treatment comes first
This is psychotherapy, not medical treatment. Withdrawal from alcohol or benzodiazepines can be dangerous and occasionally life threatening, and needs to be managed by a GP, an addiction psychiatrist or a medically supervised detox rather than attempted alone. Where that is what is needed, it is said at the assessment and the referral is made.
The same applies where a psychiatric assessment should come first or run alongside the work, and where the right answer is residential treatment rather than weekly sessions. Therapy does the work that follows stabilisation, and it does that work better once stabilisation is in place.
Practicalities
Sessions are online by secure video, from anywhere in Ireland. Alcohol, cocaine, gambling and behavioural addictions.
I am a UKCP registered psychotherapist, a Jungian analyst and an HCPC registered art psychotherapist, with twenty-five years of clinical practice. Registration can be verified on the UKCP register.
If you are in crisis in Ireland, Pieta is free and open twenty four hours on 1800 247 247, or text HELP to 51444. Samaritans is free on 116 123, day or night. In an emergency call 112 or 999. The HSE drugs and alcohol helpline is freephone 1800 459 459.
Statistics on this page come from the Healthy Ireland Survey 2025 and Health Research Board reporting on alcohol consumption in Ireland. This page is for information and does not replace assessment or treatment.
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.
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