Eating Disorder Treatment for Dubai

There is very little specialist eating disorder provision in the Gulf, and what exists is difficult to use if you are known.

That is the situation most people describe when they first make contact. Not an absence of doctors, but an absence of anywhere to go where the fact of going will not travel. Dubai’s professional and expatriate circles are smaller than the city’s size suggests. For an Emirati family, and for many of the internationals working in finance, law and aviation, the possibility of being recognised in a waiting room is not a minor consideration. It is the thing that has prevented treatment for years.

Working with a clinician in London removes that entirely. There is no waiting room, no local record, and no chance of an encounter.

Why the registration matters at a distance

I am a UKCP-registered psychotherapist and Jungian analyst, HCPC-registered as an art psychotherapist, with twenty-five years of practice and a professional doctorate from the University of Essex on male eating disorders.

I mention the registrations because they mean something specific from another country. British clinical registration is externally verifiable: you can look me up on a public register rather than take my word for it. When you are choosing somebody you will never meet in a room, that matters more than it would locally.

What the work involves from another country

Intensive eating disorder work is usually once, twice or three times a week, by secure video, at times that fit a Gulf working day.

I would rather be honest about the commitment than understate it. Serious work on an eating disorder is measured in months and often in a year or more, and the frequency is higher at the beginning than at the end. How that works, and why, is set out here.

Men, particularly

My doctoral research was on male eating disorders, and it remains the area where the gap between need and provision is widest anywhere in the world. In the Gulf it is wider still. Men rarely present, are rarely asked, and are frequently missed by clinicians whose training was built on female presentations.

If you are a man in Dubai who has been managing this privately for years, you are the person that research was about.

Practical

Sessions in English or French. No referral required. Nothing disclosed to any employer, insurer or family member without your explicit consent.

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.