Alcohol Addiction Treatment in London

Alcohol addiction treatment in London

Alcohol is the most common dependency among high-achieving professionals, and the hardest to recognise from the outside. This practice offers confidential, specialist alcohol addiction treatment in London and online, one-to-one, with Dr Philippe Jacquet, a Hazelden-trained addiction specialist with 25 years of clinical experience at Harley Street.

Treatment is not primarily about stopping drinking. It is about understanding what the drinking has been doing, what it manages, softens or makes bearable, and addressing that, so that recovery is real and lasting rather than a matter of willpower.

High-functioning alcohol dependency

The most frequent presentation is the person whose professional and outward life remains intact while their relationship with alcohol has crossed a line they can no longer manage privately. There is often no rock bottom, no obvious crisis, simply a growing private knowledge that something has changed. This is exactly the presentation that residential models, built around visible breakdown, serve least well, and that one-to-one specialist work serves best.

Am I an alcoholic?

If you are asking the question seriously, the honest answer does not start with quantities. It starts with consequences: whether costs are piling up in your work, your relationships or your health while the drinking continues, and whether promises to stop or cut down keep failing. When you are no longer choosing, the label matters less than the fact. Two more things from long practice with this presentation. First, the “functioning” in functioning alcoholic is temporary: it is a phase, not a type, and the mask eventually breaks. Second, the drinking rarely travels alone; in successful people it is often woven with overwork, and sometimes with cocaine and other compulsions, in a ritual where one addiction opens onto the next, driven underneath by the gap between the outward image of success and the inward sense of failure. Dr Jacquet explores all of this in The Functioning Alcoholic.

Alcohol, sugar and the eating disorder beneath it

In chemical terms, alcohol is liquid sugar, and for many people, particularly men, a drinking problem is not only about alcohol. It often sits on top of an untreated eating disorder. Where solid sugar and food have long been used to manage difficult feelings, through bingeing, restriction or compulsive eating, alcohol can quietly become the same mechanism in a different form.

This is why a great many men relapse on alcohol again and again: the eating disorder beneath the drinking was never recognised or treated. Stop the alcohol, and the underlying need the sugar was meeting simply finds another route. Treating the two together, rather than the drinking alone, is often what allows recovery to hold.

This connection is a particular specialism here. Dr Jacquet holds what is, to our knowledge, Europe’s only doctorate specifically on male eating disorders from an analytical psychology perspective, and treats eating disorder treatment in London and male eating disorders alongside addiction, as the linked difficulties they so often are.

Alcohol and cocaine, which in central London travel together

This is something I see in London and do not see in the same way elsewhere.

Clients who come to me in Colchester, and those I work with in France and Belgium, tend to present with alcohol on its own. In central London they very often present with both alcohol and cocaine, and the two are not two separate habits that happen to coexist. They run on each other. The cocaine extends the drinking, the drinking takes the edge off the cocaine, and the evening carries on far longer than either would allow by itself.

That is an observation from my own consulting room rather than a research finding, but it has been consistent enough over the years that I now ask about it early. Treating the drinking and leaving the cocaine untouched tends not to hold, because it was never two rituals. It was one.

The approach

The work draws on Dr Jacquet’s training at the Hazelden Foundation, the international benchmark in addiction treatment, and his experience supervising clinical teams in private residential addiction treatment and in a private psychiatric hospital. It addresses the underlying psychological patterns, builds emotional regulation, and processes the trauma or distress the drinking was managing in the first place. Recovery is treated as a long arc, not a quick fix.

Alcohol treatment sits within the practice’s wider addiction counselling in London, alongside specialist help for cocaine and stimulant addiction, gambling addiction and sex and pornography addiction. Sessions are available in person at Harley Street W1, Central London and Bermondsey, and online across the UK and internationally.

When medical treatment comes first

This is psychotherapy, not medical treatment. Withdrawal from alcohol or benzodiazepines can be dangerous and occasionally life threatening, and needs to be managed by a GP, an addiction psychiatrist or a medically supervised detox rather than attempted alone. Where that is what is needed, it is said at the assessment and the referral is made.

The same applies where a psychiatric assessment should come first or run alongside the work, and where the right answer is residential treatment rather than weekly sessions. Therapy does the work that follows stabilisation, and it does that work better once stabilisation is in place.

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.

In person: addiction therapist in London, at Harley Street and online.

In Switzerland: confidential addiction treatment across Switzerland, in English, online from London.

Also available: addiction therapist in London.