Addiction Counselling

When the long evenings become the problem

Addiction flourishes quietly in expat life. The structures that held the drinking in place at home, the routine, the reputation, the people who would notice, are gone. The social life of international Lisbon runs on wine and long evenings; the loneliness underneath it is rarely spoken. What was social at home becomes structural abroad, and by the time it is named, it has usually been true for years.

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. Hazelden-trained, nine years working inside private rehab, five supervising it clinically, twenty-five years across addiction and eating disorders: the depth of a specialist, with the independence of distance. Alcohol, cocaine, gambling, and the compulsions that hide inside successful lives.

What actually changed when you moved

It is worth being precise about this, because it is almost never a failure of character.

Drinking is held in place at home by things nobody notices until they are gone. A commute that makes a third glass expensive. A colleague who would remark on it. A GP who has known you fifteen years. Family within driving distance. A reputation built over decades among people who would see a change in you.

Move, and every one of those disappears in a week. What remains is a social life conducted largely around wine, evenings that are longer than they were, a currency of leisure that makes drinking at four in the afternoon look like integration rather than a problem, and nobody within two thousand miles who knew what you were like before.

The drinking did not necessarily increase. The things restraining it were removed. That distinction matters, because it explains why the shame attached to it is misplaced, and why the usual promise to yourself has kept failing.

The people who tend to arrive here

Not the people the word addiction brings to mind.

Founders who moved for the tax position and now run a company across three time zones from a flat in Príncipe Real. Senior professionals working remotely for firms in London or New York, whose colleagues have no idea what time it is where they are. Couples who moved for a better life and found the marriage came with them. People who retired early to the Algarve and discovered that a life without structure is harder to inhabit than they expected.

What they have in common is that they are functioning, often conspicuously. The work still gets done. That capacity to keep performing while something else deteriorates is not incidental; it is the same obsession and compulsion that built the career in the first place, and I have written about why that makes disciplined people the hardest to treat.

Do you have to go away?

This is usually the real question underneath the enquiry, and the honest answer is: often not.

UK clinical guidance on alcohol dependence reserves inpatient or residential withdrawal for defined circumstances, and states that mild and moderate dependence can commonly be managed at home following proper risk assessment. Where those criteria are met, residential treatment is the right course and should not be delayed. Where they are not, serious weekly work with an experienced clinician is the first-line option, not the consolation prize. I have set out what the guidance actually says separately.

For someone living in Portugal, this matters practically. Disappearing for six weeks means explaining an absence to a business, a family and a community. A great many people will not do that, and so do nothing at all. Weekly work makes the alternative real.

I spent nine years working inside private rehab and five supervising it clinically, and I take no referral fee from any clinic. If residential treatment is genuinely what you need, you will be told so plainly by someone with no financial interest in the answer.

What the work is

The same clinician every week, at a fixed time, by secure video, on Lisbon time. No programme, no phases, no completion date, no keyworker rota.

The behaviour is addressed directly, but it is not mistaken for the problem. Alcohol, cocaine and gambling are almost always anaesthetic; underneath sits something that has not been dealt with, and treating the anaesthetic while leaving the pain intact is why so much treatment does not hold. Remove the drinking from someone who has never examined what the drinking was for, and something else generally arrives to do the same job.

Discretion in a village

International Lisbon is a village: everyone knows everyone, and the local clinic may know your neighbour. An independent London practitioner keeps your recovery entirely separate from your world. Where food and drink run together, as they very often do, both are treated in the same relationship. And where the drinking sits on old wounds, the trauma too can be processed.

A first conversation is confidential and without commitment. Book here. The full picture of the addiction practice: addiction therapist in London.

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.

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.

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