Specialist eating disorder treatment for Nairobi, online
For clients in Nairobi and across Kenya, Dr Philippe Jacquet offers specialist eating disorder therapy online by secure video, in English and French, at the same clinical standard as his Harley Street practice in London.
He holds a Doctorate of Professional Practice with doctoral research specifically on male eating disorders from an analytical psychology perspective — to our knowledge the only research of its kind in Europe — and is in long-term recovery from an eating disorder himself.
The provision problem in East Africa
Specialist eating disorder treatment is scarce across the region in a way that is difficult to convey to anyone who has not tried to find it.
There are excellent clinicians in Nairobi. What is largely absent is the specialist tier: practitioners whose primary expertise is eating disorders, working with adults, at the depth these conditions require. For serious presentations, the options have generally been to travel to South Africa or Europe, to work with a generalist, or to go untreated. Most people take the third.
The consequence is delay, and delay is the single variable that most reliably worsens outcome. Eating disorders entrench. What might have taken a year of work at onset takes considerably longer after five.
The assumption that costs the most time
There is a belief, widespread in the region and held by patients and clinicians alike, that eating disorders are a Western problem — something affecting white adolescent girls in Europe and North America, and not really occurring here.
It is wrong, and it does a great deal of damage. It means Kenyan and East African patients are not screened, not asked, and frequently not believed when they raise it. It means their symptoms are attributed to stress, to a stomach complaint, to overwork. And it means the patients themselves discount what is happening, because what they are experiencing does not match the only picture of an eating disorder they have ever been shown.
That mismatch between the stereotype and the reality is the central obstacle in this field, and it is compounded for men.
Men, and what gets missed
Men make up a substantial proportion of eating disorder cases and are systematically under-diagnosed. The reason is largely that male presentations often do not look like the clinical stereotype.
Many men with eating disorders do not restrict in the way the textbook describes. They control composition — protein, macronutrients, timing — in a way that reads from outside as health consciousness or athletic commitment. The gym becomes the site of the compulsion. Muscle dysmorphia shares the psychological structure of anorexia exactly: a body that is never sufficient, a self contingent on physical performance, a compulsive behaviour that is the only available answer to an unbearable internal state.
Nobody calls that an eating disorder. It is called discipline, dedication, being in good shape. Nairobi’s professional and expatriate culture, with its serious gym and endurance-sport scene, provides unusually good cover for it.
Dr Jacquet’s doctoral research examined precisely this: why men do not seek help, how their presentations differ, and what makes therapeutic work effective with them.
What expatriate life does to eating
Two patterns recur in this population.
The first is loss of control over the food environment. In households with domestic staff, someone else shops, plans and cooks. For most people that is a straightforward relief. For someone whose relationship with food is already difficult, the removal of control over it can be genuinely destabilising, and it is almost never mentioned to anyone because it sounds absurd to complain about.
The second is the opposite: in a life where the job, the city, the school and the social circle were all determined by someone else’s posting, food and the body become the one domain still entirely under personal control. That is a common route into restriction, and it usually begins as something that felt like taking charge.
How the work is done
The approach is integrative and Jungian, and it is not symptom management. The question is what the eating behaviour is doing — what it soothes, what it postpones, what it protects against — because removing the behaviour without understanding its function simply relocates it. Very often another compulsion arrives in its place.
Where an eating disorder sits alongside addiction, as it frequently does, both are treated by the same clinician in one relationship rather than split between services. Where trauma is underneath, EMDR may form part of the work once there is sufficient stability for it.
Where medical monitoring is required, that must be arranged locally alongside the therapy. Assessing whether it is needed is part of the first conversation, and if outpatient psychological work is not safe as a first step, that is said directly.
Related services for Nairobi
This forms part of a wider eating disorder specialism based in London, including male eating disorders. See all services for Nairobi and Kenya.
A first conversation is confidential and without commitment: get in touch.
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 specialist eating disorder treatment available in Kenya?
Specialist, doctoral-level eating disorder provision is very scarce across East Africa, particularly for adults and particularly for men. This practice offers private one-to-one specialist therapy online, usually with no waiting list and no referral required.
How are sessions delivered?
Online by secure video, in English and French, scheduled around East Africa Time. The clinical depth is not reduced by the format, and the work continues uninterrupted through travel, leave and relocation.
Which eating disorders are treated?
Anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder and orthorexia, together with compulsive exercise and muscle dysmorphia, which share the same psychological structure but are rarely identified as eating disorders at all.
Do you treat men with eating disorders?
Yes, as a particular specialism. Dr Jacquet holds a Doctorate of Professional Practice whose research was specifically on male eating disorders from the perspective of analytical psychology, which is, to our knowledge, the only doctoral research of its kind in Europe. He is also in long-term recovery from an eating disorder himself.
Can eating disorders be treated online?
Psychological treatment, yes, and it is often the only specialist option available in the region. Where weight or physical state requires medical monitoring, that has to be provided locally alongside the therapy, and establishing whether it is needed is part of the first conversation. Where someone is not medically safe for outpatient work, this is said plainly rather than worked around.