Qatar

Psychotherapy and counselling for Qatar, online

For people in Doha and across Qatar, Dr Philippe Jacquet offers confidential psychotherapy, counselling and coaching online by secure video. He is a Jungian analyst with twenty-five years of clinical experience and an executive coach trained at ESSEC Business School, working in English and French. The online format suits a country of internationally mobile professionals and families, and keeps the work continuous through travel and relocation.

What is available

The practice works across the full range of adult difficulty, all online: counselling and psychotherapy for anxiety, depression, stress and life transitions; couples and marriage counselling; EMDR for trauma, with more than twenty years of practice; confidential addiction support, including high-functioning presentations; specialist eating-disorder treatment, with particular expertise in men; and executive coaching for senior leaders. It also draws on Jungian analysis for questions of meaning and direction.

What the move tends to do

Almost nobody arrives in Doha expecting the difficulty to be psychological. The package is good, the work is interesting, and the practical problems are solvable.

What is harder to anticipate is the removal of everything that used to hold a life steady. The friends who would have noticed a change in you are five thousand kilometres away and hear the edited version on a call. The family who would have interrupted are not here. The professional identity that organised your sense of yourself does not translate at a dinner in West Bay, where nobody knew you before and everyone is somebody’s colleague.

For a while that is liberating. Then it is not, and the thing that has quietly grown in the space has usually been growing for a couple of years before anyone says a word about it.

Alcohol, and why it behaves differently here

This is worth saying plainly because it is rarely written about and it matters clinically.

In a jurisdiction where alcohol is licensed and its use socially circumscribed, drinking does not disappear. It moves indoors. It becomes domestic, private, unobserved, and detached from the ordinary social rhythms that regulate it elsewhere: no walking home, no colleagues at the next table, no one counting.

That produces a pattern I see repeatedly. Consumption that would have been visible in London becomes entirely invisible in Doha, and the person concerned has no external reference point at all for whether it has changed. There is also a real reluctance to raise it with anyone locally, for reasons that are not imagined.

The consequence is that people arrive at this later, and at a heavier point, than they would at home. If that is your situation, it is worth knowing that this is a common presentation rather than an unusual one, and that the addiction work is done entirely outside the country.

The partner who came too

A population the brochures never mention, and a substantial part of this practice.

One person is recruited; the other gives up a career, a network and an income to come. What follows is often a marked loss of identity, an unequal dependence that neither party chose, and a difficulty that is very hard to voice, because the family is objectively better off and complaining feels ungrateful.

That combination, isolated, unoccupied, financially dependent, and not entitled to be unhappy, is one of the more reliable routes into depression and into drinking that I encounter. It is also very treatable, and it is often the accompanying partner rather than the employee who does the most useful work.

When the package is the trap

For senior people the second difficulty is the opposite one. The role has stopped meaning much, and leaving is not simple, because the income is tax-free and not matched anywhere they might go back to.

That is the golden cage in a Gulf-specific form, and it is worth understanding what it is doing psychologically rather than treating it as a purely financial calculation. I have written about that at length in Finance: the Golden Cage, and about the capacity that built the career and now will not switch off in The Addictive Personality.

Why people in Qatar choose an outside practitioner

In a relatively small and closely connected community, discretion is not a detail. It is the condition that makes the work possible. Many people in Doha hesitate to seek help locally for fear of being recognised. Working online with a practitioner based outside Qatar removes that concern entirely: the space is genuinely private, one to one, with no group setting and no local record, and it offers a depth of training that is not always available nearby. For executives, founders, public figures and internationally mobile families, that privacy is exactly the point.

Executive coaching for Qatar leaders

For founders, executives and senior professionals in finance, energy and government-linked organisations, the coaching here combines the rigour of an ESSEC business-school training with the depth of Jungian analysis. It works not only on performance and leadership behaviour, but on what drives them. You can read more on the executive coaching page.

Therapy that fits life in Qatar

Doha’s professional community, concentrated in energy, finance and government-linked organisations, is internationally mobile and tightly knit. In a small society where people are easily recognised, the wish for privacy is acute, and depth-oriented therapy in English or French is not always available locally. An experienced practitioner met entirely online answers both needs at once.

How online sessions work from Qatar

Sessions are by secure video, scheduled around a small time difference (Qatar is two to three hours ahead of London). The online format suits the travel that senior roles involve and keeps the work steady, while meeting from a private space, with a practitioner outside the local community, removes the fear of being seen that holds many people back.

Dr Jacquet also works with families on helping a son master his energy - confidential therapy for young men, at Harley Street and online.

All international work is delivered by secure video. How the online work is done.

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.

International health insurance, or private

Many internationally mobile clients are covered by global private health plans, designed for exactly this kind of specialist care (see how to use your insurance for psychotherapy). Dr Jacquet works with major insurers including Bupa, Cigna, AXA and Aviva, and his training is international: the Hazelden Foundation in the United States, a Master's and Doctorate in the United Kingdom, and executive coaching at ESSEC in Paris. If you prefer to pay privately, without insurance, that is equally welcome; the work is exactly the same.

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.