Lisbon

Psychotherapy for international Lisbon

Lisbon has become one of Europe’s great expatriate cities: entrepreneurs, remote executives, retired professionals and families drawn by the light and the life. What the move brochures never mention is what the move does to people: the loneliness that arrives once the novelty fades, the marriage that travelled badly, the drinking that grew in the long evenings, the sense of being nobody in a place where no one knows what you built. Dr Philippe Jacquet works with exactly this, online by secure video from his Harley Street practice in London, in English and French, on Lisbon time.

What the practice offers

A Jungian analyst with twenty-five years of clinical experience, a doctorate in male eating disorders, Hazelden addiction training and an ESSEC executive coaching formation, Dr Jacquet works across the full adult range: anxiety, depression and life transitions; couples therapy in English and the patterns that follow us abroad; addiction counselling, which flourishes quietly in expat life; eating disorders; trauma and EMDR; and executive coaching for leaders running businesses remotely from Portugal.

Why it matters that it is in your own language

This is the part that sounds like a convenience and is actually clinical.

You can be fluent in a second language and still find that the important material does not live there. Emotion, memory and the things that happened when you were seven are encoded in the language you were a child in. People working in a second language tend to describe their lives accurately and at a slight distance, competently, almost as a summary. The register that matters, the one where the voice changes and something surfaces that was not planned, is very hard to reach in a language you learned as an adult.

For anyone doing serious work on trauma, addiction or an eating disorder, that distance is not a small handicap. It is the difference between describing a childhood and being back inside one.

This practice works in English and in French, as first languages, not as accommodations.

The people who move to Portugal, and what tends to follow

Lisbon and the Algarve now hold several quite different populations, and they arrive with different difficulties.

Founders and technology people who came for the tax position and the light, running companies remotely, often at an intensity nobody around them can see. Senior professionals working for firms in London, Zurich or New York whose colleagues have no real idea where they are. Couples who moved to repair something and found that the marriage travelled with them intact. And people who retired early, sometimes very comfortably, into a life with no structure in it, which is far harder to inhabit than the brochures suggest.

What connects them is a particular kind of invisibility. Nobody here knew you before. The professional identity that organised your life does not translate at a dinner table in Cascais. There is no one to notice that you are different from how you were, because nobody has the comparison.

That is liberating for a while, and then it is not.

What is worked with here

The full adult range, with three areas of genuine specialism: addiction, which grows quietly in expatriate life; eating disorders, including the male presentations that are routinely missed; and trauma, with EMDR where indicated.

Alongside those: relocation strain and the loss of identity that follows a move, couples work, anxiety and depression, midlife transition, and the particular pressure carried by people running businesses from a country they did not grow up in.

Discretion in a village

International Lisbon is a village: everyone knows everyone, and the therapist at the local clinic may know your neighbour. Working with an independent London practitioner keeps your inner life entirely separate from your social world. Nothing is disclosed to anyone without your consent, save for the narrow legal and safeguarding limits explained at the outset.

Beginning

A first conversation is confidential and without commitment, by secure video on Lisbon time. Book here. Version française : psychothérapeute français à Lisbonne.

All international work is delivered by secure video. How online therapy works here.

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.

International health insurance, or private

Many internationally mobile clients are covered by global private health plans, designed for exactly this kind of specialist care (see how to use your insurance for psychotherapy). Dr Jacquet works with major insurers including Bupa, Cigna, AXA and Aviva, and his training is international: the Hazelden Foundation in the United States, a Master's and Doctorate in the United Kingdom, and executive coaching at ESSEC in Paris. If you prefer to pay privately, without insurance, that is equally welcome; the work is exactly the same.

How the work is delivered from here

All international sessions are by secure video, in English or French. Online therapy is not a reduced version of consulting room work: it is the format that lets weekly work survive living abroad, travelling, or relocating. Sessions run in United Kingdom hours, which suits most regions, and if your time zone makes none of it workable, say so when you enquire rather than assuming it rules you out.

For clinicians and treatment services

Dr Jacquet supervises clinical teams in private residential addiction treatment and in a private psychiatric hospital. For treatment centres, psychiatric units and group practices looking for external clinical supervision, including in places where no supervisor of this seniority is available locally, team supervision is also delivered by video. For individual practitioners, see clinical supervision.