Addiction

Addiction counselling for Bahrain, online and confidential

For people living and working in Manama and across Bahrain, Dr Philippe Jacquet offers confidential, specialist addiction counselling online by secure video, in English and French. He is a Hazelden-trained addiction specialist and Jungian analyst with twenty-five years of clinical experience at Harley Street in London, and supervises the clinical teams at PROMIS Recovery Centre and Cardinal Clinic.

The golden cage

Bahrain draws people for good reasons: the lifestyle, the ease, the absence of tax, the sense of a comfortable life on favourable terms. But for many expatriates, the very things that make it attractive slowly become a trap. The usual structures that hold a life together are absent: the long friendships, the closeness of family, the culture you instinctively understand. Integrating into a society that is not your own is harder than it looks, and the isolation can sit quietly underneath an outwardly successful, well-rewarded existence.

For a great many people, alcohol and drugs fill that gap. What begins as reward, the drink after work, the weekend that stretches, becomes the thing that gets you through, and then the thing you cannot stop. The golden cage, beautiful and comfortable, becomes a bed for addiction. It is a pattern seen again and again in affluent expatriate life, and it is rarely spoken about, because so much depends on appearances.

Discreet, and from outside the region

The difficulty for most people here is not access to resources; it is finding genuinely specialist help that can be undertaken in complete confidence, without exposure and without a record that goes anywhere it should not. Going to a residential clinic means absence and disclosure. The alternative offered here is intensive, consistent one-to-one work, conducted privately from your own home, on your schedule and in your timezone. Working online with a senior practitioner outside the region gives a private space and a depth of clinical training not always available locally.

What is treated

The full range of addictions: alcohol dependency, including high-functioning presentations where professional life appears intact but the relationship with alcohol has crossed a line; cocaine and stimulants; prescription medication; gambling and behavioural addiction; and sex and pornography addiction. Recovery is treated as a long-term process that addresses the underlying psychological drivers, and the trauma the addiction was often managing in the first place. The work draws, where helpful, on EMDR for that trauma. Nothing is disclosed to any employer, family member or third party without your explicit consent.

See all services for Bahrain.