The reason most people in the Gulf leave a drinking or drug problem untreated for years is not denial. It is consequence.
An addiction damages work, standing and family wherever you are. What differs here is exposure. Dubai’s professional and expatriate circles are small, the communities within them smaller, and the ordinary first step of mentioning it to a local doctor carries a visibility that people in London never have to weigh. That is a real calculation, not a paranoid one.
The result is a large population of high-functioning professionals managing something serious entirely alone, often for years, and getting steadily worse in private.
What working with a clinician in London changes
Everything about the exposure. There is no local record, no local practitioner, no waiting room and no possibility of encountering anyone. Nothing exists in the UAE. Nothing is disclosed to any employer, insurer, sponsor or family member without your explicit written consent.
What I can offer is clinical work that carries no local footprint at all.
The drinking culture nobody mentions
For the expatriate population there is a second layer. Dubai’s licensed social life is intense, structured around brunches, hotel bars and industry events, and largely unobserved by anyone who knew you before. Many people describe a level of consumption that would have been remarkable at home and is entirely unremarkable here.
That normalisation is one of the reasons the problem grows so quietly.
What I bring to it
I 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, and a professional doctorate. UKCP-registered psychotherapist and Jungian analyst, HCPC-registered art psychotherapist. Both registers are public, which matters when you are choosing somebody you will never meet.
I treat alcohol, cocaine and stimulants, prescription dependency, gambling, and sex and pornography addiction, along with the eating disorders that so often travel alongside them.
Practical
Dubai is three or four hours ahead of London depending on the season, which makes early evening sessions straightforward. Once, twice or three times a week depending on what is needed, reducing as things steady. English or French.
On how I think about residential care versus intensive one-to-one work.
On the choice between residential treatment and intensive one-to-one work: addiction counselling and therapy in London.
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.
Common questions
Is this genuinely confidential?
Entirely. There is no waiting room, no receptionist, no records held anywhere in the UAE, and nothing disclosed to any employer, insurer, sponsor or family member without your explicit written consent. Online sessions leave no local footprint.
Do you work with people who cannot risk a local diagnosis?
Regularly. It is one of the main reasons people in the region make contact, and I do not require a referral from anyone.
Would residential treatment be better?
Sometimes, and I will tell you honestly. Nine years working inside private residential treatment and five supervising clinical teams there mean the answer will be clinical rather than commercial. Where supervised detox is needed, that has to come first and locally.