Hong Kong’s English-speaking professional community has a specific problem: excellent medical provision, and very little of it in English at the level of depth this work requires.
For the expatriate and internationally educated population in finance, law and the professions, that gap matters more than it sounds. Psychological work happens in language. Conducting it in a second language, or through a clinician whose English is functional rather than fluent, produces sessions that are polite, articulate and largely ineffective, because the material is being translated before it can be felt.
Add that the professional community is small and interconnected, and that the hours leave almost no room, and the ordinary outcome is that nothing happens for years.
Two things make it hard to address locally
The first is space. Hong Kong flats are small and often shared across generations. Concealment is exhausting, and so is the absence of anywhere private to have a difficult conversation.
The second is professional risk. The finance and legal community is small and interconnected, and a local diagnosis or a local counsellor is not reliably private. For somebody senior, the perceived cost of being known to be in treatment usually exceeds the perceived cost of carrying on.
Working with a clinician in London removes both. Nothing is held in Hong Kong, and there is no possibility of overlap with your own professional world.
What I bring to it
Trained as an addiction specialist at the Hazelden Foundation. Nine years working inside private residential treatment, five years supervising clinical teams in it, and twenty-five years of practice. UKCP-registered psychotherapist and Jungian analyst, HCPC-registered art psychotherapist, both on public registers.
I also treat the eating disorders that so often accompany a drinking problem, which matters because a great deal of relapse is driven by an untreated relationship with food. Alcohol is, in effect, liquid sugar, and treating the drink alone tends not to hold.
Practical
Once, twice or three times a week as needed, reducing as things steady. London mornings suit Hong Kong evenings. Nothing is disclosed to any employer without your written consent.
On the choice between residential treatment and intensive one-to-one work.
On the choice between residential treatment and intensive one-to-one work: addiction counselling and therapy in London.
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 it confidential from my employer?
Entirely. Nothing is disclosed to any employer, insurer or third party without your written consent, and nothing is held in Hong Kong.
Does the time difference work?
Yes. Hong Kong is seven or eight hours ahead of London depending on the season, so London mornings are Hong Kong evenings.
Can I do this without taking leave?
That is the point of it. Intensive one-to-one work by secure video means you do not disappear for six weeks, which for many people is the difference between getting help and continuing as they are.