Addiction counselling in Marbella
The Costa del Sol’s international community is large, but discreet, English-speaking addiction treatment with real clinical depth is scarce. Alcohol and cocaine in particular are woven into the social fabric of the area, and private specialist help is hard to find.
This practice offers specialist addiction treatment for Marbella, online by secure video, in English and French, with a Hazelden-trained specialist of 25 years’ experience.
The approach
Treatment is not primarily about stopping a behaviour, but about understanding what it has been doing, what it manages or protects against. Addiction is rarely a failure of character; it is usually a solution to something, and effective treatment starts there. The work draws on Dr Jacquet’s training at the Hazelden Foundation and his clinical supervision experience.
The full range is treated: alcohol and cocaine addiction, gambling, and sex and pornography addiction.
Where an eating disorder accompanies the addiction, a common combination, the two are treated together; see eating disorder counselling in Marbella.
Before a clinic, and after one
Most people searching for addiction help on the Costa del Sol are looking for a rehab. The coast has a well-established residential industry, and for some people that is exactly the right answer.
This is not one. There is no bed, no detox, no medical supervision. It is one senior clinician working individually, and it sits either side of a residential stay rather than in place of it.
Before. The decision about residential treatment is almost never taken calmly. There is a crisis, a family pressing, an employer who has noticed, and a choice being made fast and frightened. A clear assessment at that moment is worth a great deal: is a clinic actually necessary, or is it being reached for because it feels decisive? Where medically supervised detoxification is needed, where withdrawal carries a real risk of seizure, where someone is not safe alone, the honest answer is a clinic and it will be said plainly. Where it is not medically necessary, that is worth knowing before committing to weeks away and a five-figure cost.
After. This is the half that is rarely discussed and where a great deal of residential treatment quietly fails. Someone leaves a clinic on the coast after four or six weeks and returns to the same life, the same house, the same reasons, with the structure that held them ending on the day of discharge. Relapse after a stay is common and it is rarely a failure of will; it is the absence of anything continuous. Dr Jacquet spent nine years working inside residential treatment and supervises clinical teams in a private residential clinic and a private psychiatric hospital today, so the handover is familiar ground.
Why the coast is its own risk
Marbella concentrates several things that make a drinking or cocaine problem easy to sustain and hard to notice.
The social calendar runs on alcohol, and it runs all year rather than in bursts. A large part of the international population is retired, semi-retired or working remotely, so the ordinary structure that limits drinking — an office, a commute, colleagues who would notice — is absent. Nobody is watching the level in the bottle. And the people who would have said something are in another country, hearing an edited version on a call.
Cocaine is widely available and socially normalised in parts of the coastal scene in a way that people arriving from elsewhere find genuinely surprising.
None of that is unique to Marbella, but the combination of money, sunshine, unstructured time and distance from family is a specific pressure, and it tends to produce a long slow slide rather than a crisis anyone can point to.
In person and online
Sessions take place by secure video, in strict confidence, with continuity maintained for clients who travel between the coast and elsewhere. There is usually no waiting list, and no referral is needed.
This forms part of the practice’s wider addiction counselling in London, alongside the full range of therapy and coaching in Marbella.
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 addiction treatment available in English in Marbella?
Yes, in English and French, online by secure video. Dr Jacquet is based in London; he travels to the coast only occasionally, by private arrangement and at the client's cost, so the ordinary and sustainable arrangement is weekly online work.
Which addictions do you treat?
Alcohol, cocaine and other drugs, gambling, and sex and pornography addiction, along with the patterns beneath them.
Is this an alternative to a residential clinic?
Not in the sense of a cheaper substitute for a clinic, and this is not a residential service: there is no bed, no detox and no medical supervision. It is the senior specialist option for people who will not go residential at any price, and it is the work either side for those who do — the last conversation before that decision is taken, and the first one after leaving. Where medically supervised detoxification is genuinely needed, that is said plainly at assessment and the referral is made.
Is it confidential?
Strictly confidential. Sessions are private and discreet, by secure video.