Singapore’s professional culture produces two very different addiction problems, and the second one almost never reaches treatment.
The first is alcohol, and it is largely structural. Long hours, client entertainment, and a social life organised around drinking make a developing dependency difficult to see and easy to justify. Somebody drinking heavily four nights a week in Singapore finance is not conspicuous. They are participating.
The second is anything illegal, and here the situation differs from most of the world in a way that matters enormously for treatment.
Therapy requires that you can say the true thing. Not a version of it, not the part that is safe to admit, but what is actually happening. That is not a stylistic preference, it is the mechanism: nothing can be worked with that cannot be said.
Where the legal consequences of drug use are severe, that condition becomes very hard to meet locally. Disclosing to a local doctor, a local counsellor or an employer’s health scheme is not a small step, and most people quite reasonably do not take it. What follows is not that they get poor treatment. It is that they get no treatment, for years, while managing something serious entirely alone.
Working with a psychotherapist in London restores the condition. There is no local record of any kind, nothing held in Singapore, and nothing disclosed to anyone without your consent, save for the narrow legal and safeguarding limits every registered practitioner is bound by, which are explained at the outset. You can say the true thing, which is where the work actually starts.
What working from outside changes
There is no waiting room, no local practitioner, no notes held in Singapore and no professional overlap with your own world. Nothing is disclosed to any employer, insurer 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.
For the expatriate population there is the additional point that you are far from everyone who knew you before, in an environment where visible difficulty carries a professional cost. That combination is one of the strongest incentives to conceal that I encounter anywhere.
What I bring to it
Trained as an addiction specialist at the Hazelden Foundation. Nine years working inside private residential treatment, five years supervising clinical teams in it, twenty-five years of practice, a professional doctorate. UKCP-registered psychotherapist and Jungian analyst, HCPC-registered art psychotherapist, both on public registers.
I treat alcohol, cocaine and stimulants, prescription dependency, gambling, and sex and pornography addiction, together with the eating disorders that frequently accompany them. In high-performing populations the two are usually one problem rather than two.
Practical
Once, twice or three times a week depending on what is needed, reducing as things steady. Sessions arranged around the working day rather than the reverse.
On the choice between residential treatment and intensive one-to-one work.
On the choice between residential treatment and intensive one-to-one work: addiction counselling and therapy in London.
Containment, and challenge
If you have spent decades being the most capable person in most rooms, the people around you have adjusted. Staff do not push back, boards do it within a managed frame, and family have usually concluded it is not worth the cost. The result is not arrogance but isolation of a particular kind: your own judgement becomes the only judgement operating on you, and judgement never met by another judgement drifts.
What helps is not sympathy or admiration. It is a clinician who can contain what you are carrying without buckling, and who has nothing whatsoever to lose by disagreeing with you. More on what that means in 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.
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 this confidential from my employer?
Nothing is disclosed to any employer, insurer 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, no records are held in Singapore, and online sessions leave no local footprint.
Does the time difference work?
Yes. Singapore is seven or eight hours ahead of London depending on the season, which makes London mornings and Singapore evenings the natural slot.
Would residential treatment be better?
Sometimes, and I will tell you honestly rather than commercially. Nine years working inside private residential treatment and five supervising clinical teams there inform that judgement. Where physical dependency requires supervised detox, that has to be handled medically first.