Saudi Arabia

Psychotherapy and counselling for Saudi Arabia, online

For people in Riyadh, Jeddah and across Saudi Arabia, 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 fast-changing country of senior professionals, returning Saudi nationals and internationally mobile families, and keeps the work continuous through travel.

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; executive coaching for senior leaders; and discreet, confidential support for addiction and eating disorders. It also draws on Jungian analysis for questions of meaning and direction.

Why discretion matters, and why people choose an outside practitioner

In Saudi Arabia, privacy is paramount, and many people are understandably reluctant to seek help where they might be recognised. Working online with a practitioner based outside the country 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 locally. For executives, founders, public figures and internationally mobile families, that confidentiality is the condition that makes the work possible. Nothing is disclosed to any employer, family member or third party without your consent, save for the narrow legal and safeguarding limits every registered practitioner is bound by, which are explained at the outset.

After treatment in the UK

Over the years I have worked with a substantial number of people who travelled from Saudi Arabia to the United Kingdom for addiction treatment. Some came for residential programmes, some for intensive private work, and some for both.

What almost nobody arranges is what happens next.

A person completes a programme in England, having done difficult and genuine work, and then flies home. The clinical relationship ends at the airport. They return to the same house, the same job, the same family and the same pressures that were there before, and the people who know what they have just been through are five thousand kilometres away.

That is where relapse tends to happen. Not during treatment, when everything is held. Afterwards, when nothing is.

I can continue the work from wherever you are, by secure video, without a break. That may mean weekly sessions for a year, or a monthly conversation that keeps the thread intact. It is the same clinician, who already knows the history, rather than starting again with somebody new who does not.

If you are considering coming to the UK for treatment, it is worth planning the return before you plan the departure.

What the move removes

The practical problems of relocating are solvable. What is harder to anticipate is the loss of every external reference point that used to hold a life steady.

The friends who would have noticed a change hear the edited version on a call. The family who would have interrupted are elsewhere. Nobody here knew you before, so nobody has a comparison, and a person can drift a considerable way from themselves before anything is said aloud.

Returning after an education abroad

A population I see often, and one that is rarely written about.

Someone spends four or eight formative years studying in Britain or the United States, forms a self there, and comes back. What follows is not simple homesickness. It is the difficulty of holding two frames of reference at once, each of which makes complete sense on its own terms and neither of which fully accommodates the other.

That produces a particular kind of isolation, because it cannot easily be described to people in either place. Friends abroad hear it as ingratitude; family at home may hear it as rejection. It is neither, and it is workable, but it usually requires someone outside both worlds to think about it with.

The partner who came too

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 neither party chose, and a difficulty that is hard to voice because the family is objectively better off and complaining feels ungrateful. Isolated, unoccupied, financially dependent and not entitled to be unhappy is one of the more reliable routes into depression that I encounter, and it is frequently the accompanying partner rather than the employee who does the most useful work.

Executive coaching for Saudi leaders

For founders, executives and senior professionals across Saudi Arabia’s rapidly developing economy, 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 Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is changing quickly, and with it the pressures on senior professionals, returning nationals and the large expatriate workforce in Riyadh and Jeddah. Yet stigma around emotional difficulty remains strong, and many people are understandably wary of seeking help where they might be known. Depth-oriented therapy in English or French, delivered with complete discretion from outside the country, offers a way through that local options often cannot.

How online sessions work from Saudi Arabia

Sessions are by secure video, scheduled around a small time difference (Saudi Arabia is two to three hours ahead of London). The format keeps the work continuous through travel between cities or abroad, and meeting privately, with a practitioner entirely outside the local world, is precisely what allows people to speak openly when discretion matters most.

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. Online therapy with this practice.

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.