Zurich concentrates two things: the financial industry, and private wealth at a level found in very few places.
That combination produces a particular kind of patient, and it is not the one people expect. Not somebody whose life has fallen apart, but somebody whose life is by any external measure enviable, and whose quality of life is poor. The career is intact. The money is not a problem. And something has gone quiet, or hard, or numb, and there is nobody to say it to.
Because that is the difficulty with a life that looks like this from outside. Complaining is unimaginable. To whom would you say it, and in what terms? The wealth that solves every practical problem removes the vocabulary for the ones it does not solve, and people end up managing something serious for years with no language for it and no one to use it on.
What arrives in my consulting room from Zurich is usually that: drinking that has become structural, a relationship with food that runs the day, sleep that has stopped, a marriage conducted at a distance. Underneath, almost always, the same thing. A life that works and does not feel like anything.
The clinic question
Switzerland has excellent residential facilities and I am not going to disparage them.
I should be clear that I have no involvement with any Swiss clinic and cannot comment on individual ones. My residential experience is English: nine years working inside private residential care in the UK, and five supervising clinical teams there.
What that lets me offer is a general judgement rather than a local one. Residential care is right where there is medical risk, where physical health needs monitoring, or where somebody genuinely needs to step out of their life. It is wrong where the person cannot disappear for six weeks, where the exposure is unacceptable, or where the real task is learning to eat inside their own life rather than inside a facility. I will tell you honestly which I think applies, including when the answer is the clinic.
Practical
English, and French if that is easier. Zurich is one hour ahead of London. Frequency is usually once to three times a week at the start, reducing as things steady. What that involves, and why, is set out here.
UKCP-registered psychotherapist and Jungian analyst, HCPC-registered art psychotherapist, professional doctorate on eating disorders. Public registers, independently checkable.
Treatment built rather than allocated
Standard treatment assumes a standard life: a fixed hour each week, a local service, a group whose circumstances resemble your own. For someone in three countries a month, whose name is known, and for whom a six-week absence would be noticed, none of those assumptions holds.
There is also a subtler problem. When most people around you are employed by you, advised by you or dependent on the relationship, there may be very few whose opinion is genuinely disinterested. The ordinary correctives that slow a problem down are not reliably available, so it accelerates unobserved.
That is why the work has to be built around the life rather than the other way round, and why the clinician needs to be independent enough to say the unwelcome thing. More on how that is arranged.
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
Why work with London when the Jung Institute is here?
Because analytical training and eating disorder specialism are different competencies. Zurich has more depth psychology nearby than almost anywhere on earth. What is scarce, there as everywhere, is a clinician who holds both the analytic training and a doctoral specialism in eating disorders.
Is confidentiality really better at a distance?
In a professional world as interconnected as Zurich's, materially yes. Nothing is held in Switzerland, and there is no possibility of your clinician supervising a colleague or teaching a friend.
Would a Swiss clinic be better?
Sometimes, and I will say so. I have no relationship with any Swiss facility, so the answer will not be commercial. My residential experience is English: nine years inside private residential care in the UK and five supervising clinical teams there.