Executive Addiction Treatment: A Private Rehab Alternative

Confidential addiction support for executives

For a senior professional, the barrier to getting help for addiction is rarely willingness. It is exposure. Stepping away into a residential clinic for six weeks is impossible for many people carrying real responsibility, and being seen to do so can feel like a risk to a career built over decades. Dr Philippe Jacquet offers a different route: consultant-level, one-to-one addiction treatment, delivered privately at Harley Street or online, with the discretion that a public figure, board director or senior executive needs.

This is intensive, specialist work, not general counselling. Dr Jacquet trained as an addiction specialist at the Hazelden Foundation and supervises clinical teams in private residential addiction treatment and in a private psychiatric hospital. He has treated high-functioning addiction across a 25-year career.

An alternative to residential rehab

Residential rehab is the right answer for some people, and Dr Jacquet will say so plainly when it is. But it is not the only answer, and for many executives it is the wrong one: the enforced absence, the cost, and above all the exposure make it unworkable. Intensive one-to-one treatment offers a private, flexible alternative. It is consistent and demanding, but it lets you keep working, keep your privacy, and be treated as an individual rather than processed through a programme. Much of what makes residential care effective, the depth of the work and the seriousness of the commitment, is preserved; what is removed is the disappearance and the footprint. This is not a lesser option or a fallback. For the right person it is a very good alternative, and often a better fit than residential care: as serious, as deep, and led by a premium specialist, but without the cost to your freedom, your privacy or your work.

Who this is for

This work suits a particular kind of person and situation:

• The senior professional who cannot step out of their life. A residential stay means weeks away from work and family, which for many people carrying real responsibility is simply not possible. This offers the depth of serious addiction treatment without the disappearance.
• Anyone wanting a confidential alternative to an exclusive residential clinic. For those who could go to a high-end clinic but do not want the exposure, the loss of privacy, or being processed through a programme, this is consultant-level work delivered discreetly within their own life.
• The serial relapser. Some of the people helped most here have completed many residential stays, sometimes a great many, without recovery holding. A different approach, built in real life rather than in a facility, can succeed where repeated stays have not.
• People with a co-occurring condition. Where addiction sits alongside depression, anxiety, trauma or an eating disorder, it has to be treated as a whole. Dr Jacquet treats the addiction and what sits beneath it together, not in separate silos.

The right level of help, not the most drastic

If you had a headache, you would not book brain surgery. Yet addiction is often treated as though there is only one option, and the most drastic one: check into a residential clinic. For some people that is exactly right. Where there is a physical dependency that needs supervised medical detox, or a level of risk that needs round-the-clock care, residential treatment is essential, and Dr Jacquet will tell you so plainly. But for a great many high-functioning professionals, that is not the situation, and the proportionate first step is intensive, specialist support with someone who genuinely understands addiction, explored before, or instead of, the residential route.

The help people will actually accept

There is a reason addiction so often goes untreated for years: almost no one wants to go to rehab. It means weeks away from your life, a loss of freedom and privacy, and for many it feels like an admission that everything has collapsed. So people try to manage it alone, or try every other option first, and the problem quietly grows until residential care becomes the only route left. A confidential specialist you can see privately, without stepping out of your life, changes that. It is the step a person can actually bring themselves to take early, before things reach that point, and it comes at a fraction of the cost of a residential stay, which at the clinics serving this market can run to tens of thousands a week. For the people who come here, money is rarely the barrier; the barriers are exposure and what getting help would seem to mean. This removes both. Where residential care is genuinely needed, Dr Jacquet will say so plainly, but for many it never has to come to that.

Learning to stay clean in the life you actually live

There is a deeper reason to consider this route. Residential rehab works by removing you from your life, and that protection is part of its value. But it is also its limitation. Recovery has to hold in the real world, among the same pressures, relationships and triggers that were there before, and the hardest moment in any recovery is re-entry: the return to the office, the client dinner, the empty hotel room. Working confidentially within your actual life, rather than inside a protected bubble, means you build recovery where it has to survive, from the very first session. Residential care does not guarantee that transfer, which is one reason relapse after discharge is common. The aim of this work is not simply to get clean in a controlled setting; it is to learn to stay clean in the life you actually live.

It is easy to be serene in a monastery, and easy to be clean in a clinic, where the substance is absent and ordinary life is suspended. The real test is outside: at the client dinner, under deadline, alone in a hotel room, back inside the pressures that were there all along. Rehab, at its best, is discovery - a place to detox safely and to see the problem clearly, and to begin. But recovery - the longer work of staying well in the life you actually live - happens outside. That is the work this practice is built for.

The eating disorder underneath the addiction

Addiction and eating disorders travel together far more often than they are treated together, and in men especially the two are frequently the same story. A man with an addiction very often also struggles with food, and the reverse holds just as strongly: someone with an eating disorder is bingeing on sugar, and alcohol is, in effect, liquid sugar. The same mechanism, numbing feeling through something taken into the body, simply wears two costumes.

This matters for one blunt reason: people relapse. A great deal of addiction relapse is driven by an eating disorder that was never recognised or treated. A residential programme gets someone clean from the substance, sends them home, and the untreated relationship with food, and the feeling beneath it, pulls them straight back. Treat the drink or the drug alone, and you have treated half the problem. And in a residential programme, addiction and eating disorders are usually handled together, in the same group and the same setting, so the specific way the two interlock in one person is rarely worked through in the depth it needs.

This is where treating both together is decisive. Dr Jacquet is a specialist in addiction and in eating disorders, including the male eating disorders that are so routinely missed, and he treats them as the single problem they usually are. It is often what makes recovery finally hold. Read more on male eating disorders and what a male eating disorder really is.

When residential care is the right step

This practice believes in private residential clinics. They do essential work, and there are times when they are exactly what is needed: where there is a physical dependency that requires supervised detox, where risk is high, or where every proportionate alternative has genuinely been tried and the situation calls for a period away. Residential care also works best when a person is truly ready for it. Readiness is not a technicality; it is often the difference between a stay that holds and one that does not. Going before you are ready is also an expensive way to learn this: a residential stay is a significant investment, and it repays that investment only when a person is ready to use it. Preparing properly first protects both the recovery and the money. Part of Dr Jacquet’s role is to help you judge that honestly: to work with you while specialist, confidential support is the right step, and to say clearly, and help you prepare, when the time has come for a clinic. He is not against rehab. He is for the right level of help, at the moment you are ready to use it.

Aftercare and continuity after a residential stay

For those who have completed a residential programme, the hardest part often comes next: holding the change once real life resumes, far from the clinic. Dr Jacquet provides confidential aftercare and continuity online, wherever you are based, so the work done in residential care is not lost on re-entry. This is the aftercare of choice for people leaving the world’s leading private clinics: consultant-level, confidential, and delivered in the very life you are returning to, at home, in the role, under the old pressures, which is exactly where a residential stay is either kept or lost. It makes the practice a natural complement to those clinics, not a competitor to them.

What it treats

High-functioning alcohol dependency, cocaine and stimulant use, prescription dependency, gambling, and sex and pornography addiction, along with the anxiety, burnout and unresolved history that so often sit beneath them. Read more about addiction therapy in London.

Treatment that fits an unusual life

Most treatment is designed around an ordinary one. A fixed hour on a Tuesday. A local service you can reach. A group of people whose circumstances resemble yours closely enough that shared experience does the work.

For some lives, none of those assumptions hold.

If you are in three countries a month, a standing Tuesday appointment is not a commitment you can honestly make, and a programme that requires one will fail for reasons that have nothing to do with your motivation. If your face or your name is known, a group is not a place you can speak freely. And the group does not work either, because the mechanism that makes it effective is recognition, and nobody in the room recognises your life. If a six-week absence would be noticed by a board, a market or a family office, then the most drastic option is also the least available.

There is a subtler difficulty underneath all of that.

Ordinary recovery assumes you are surrounded by people whose view of you is disinterested. A friend who says the true thing. A colleague who notices. But when most of the people in your life are employed by you, advised by you, funded by you, or dependent on the relationship continuing, there may be very few whose opinion is genuinely free. That is not a complaint about wealth and it is certainly not a request for sympathy. It is a structural fact about it, and its consequence is clinical: the ordinary correctives that slow a problem down are not reliably available, so it accelerates unobserved.

Which is why this work has to be built rather than allocated.

Frequency that flexes around travel rather than collapsing under it. Sessions across time zones. Continuity that survives a month in three countries and does not treat a missed week as a failure of commitment. And a clinician senior enough to be genuinely independent: not employed by you, not dependent on the relationship, and entirely willing to say the unwelcome thing. That last one matters more than it sounds. If you are used to being agreed with, the most valuable thing a clinician can offer is that they have nothing to lose by disagreeing.

Someone who can contain you, and challenge you

There is a difficulty that arrives with having been very good at something for a long time, and it is rarely named because naming it sounds like a complaint.

If you have spent twenty or thirty years 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, on the agenda, at the appropriate moment. Family have usually tried and concluded it is not worth the cost. Friendships that survive at this level tend to survive by not going there.

The result is not arrogance. It is isolation of a specific and consequential kind: your own judgement becomes the only judgement operating on you. And judgement that is never met by another judgement drifts, because nothing external is correcting it.

That is why the ordinary advice fails here. Talk to someone. Confide in a friend. It assumes a friend whose view of you is disinterested, and when most of the people in your life are employed by you, advised by you, or dependent on the relationship continuing, there may be very few of those left.

What is needed is not sympathy, and certainly not admiration. You have had enough of both and neither has helped.

It is somebody who can contain what you are carrying, and still say the unwelcome thing.

Containment first, because that comes before anything else. The weight of a serious position, the decisions with consequences for other people, the things that cannot be said at home or at work: those have to be able to arrive somewhere that does not buckle under them. A clinician who is anxious, impressed, or out of their depth cannot hold that, and you will know within one session.

And then challenge, which is the part people are less prepared for and eventually value most. If you are used to being agreed with, the most useful thing a clinician can offer is that they have nothing whatsoever to lose by disagreeing with you. I am not employed by you. I do not need the relationship. I have no stake in your good opinion, which means when I tell you something you did not want to hear, it is worth what it costs to hear it.

That combination is the whole of what a senior clinician is for at this level. Enough experience to be unshockable, and enough independence to be honest.

Private, discreet, and built on substance

The premium end of care often sells the setting: the location, the amenities, the privacy of somewhere beautiful. Those things are pleasant, but they are not what changes an addiction. What does is the depth and consistency of the clinical work, and the calibre of the person doing it. This is a private, discreet, consultant-level practice, led by a specialist with a doctorate, Hazelden training and twenty-five years of clinical experience. It offers the same strict confidentiality as any luxury clinic, but with the substance in the work rather than the surroundings. It is for people who want the real thing, done well and done quietly, not an experience. Here, the premium is the specialist, not the setting: a senior clinician doing the deep, consistent work that lasting recovery actually takes.

An addiction specialist who has worked inside the clinics

What makes this a credible alternative to residential rehab is that it is led by someone who knows that world from the inside. Dr Philippe Jacquet trained as an addiction specialist at the Hazelden Foundation. He spent nine years working within private residential rehab, and a further five years providing clinical supervision to clinical teams in private residential and psychiatric settings. He has spent twenty-five years working with addiction.

He is also an integrative psychotherapist, with a Master’s in integrative arts psychotherapy, a Jungian analyst, holder of a professional doctorate, and trained in executive coaching at ESSEC. That combination matters: the addiction is treated by someone who also understands the executive world, the psychology beneath the behaviour, and the depression, anxiety or trauma that so often sits alongside it. Few practitioners anywhere offer this depth, and fewer still have both worked inside the leading private clinics and supervised them. It is why this practice can stand as a serious alternative to exclusive rehab, not a lesser substitute for it.

Confidentiality

Absolute. Nothing is disclosed to any employer, firm, board or third party without your explicit consent, and online sessions leave no local footprint. A first conversation is confidential and without obligation.

See also: Rehab, Honestly - when it helps, and how to choose one.

Further reading: The Imposter, Trauma, EMDR and the gentler door, The Functioning Alcoholic, Cocaine and the Illusion of Power, The Thirst for Oneness, and high-functioning depression and burnout.

Clients also come from Monaco and the Côte d’Azur: specialist psychotherapy in Monaco.

When medical treatment comes first

This is psychotherapy, not medical treatment. Withdrawal from alcohol or benzodiazepines can be dangerous and occasionally life threatening, and needs to be managed by a GP, an addiction psychiatrist or a medically supervised detox rather than attempted alone. Where that is what is needed, it is said at the assessment and the referral is made.

The same applies where a psychiatric assessment should come first or run alongside the work, and where the right answer is residential treatment rather than weekly sessions. Therapy does the work that follows stabilisation, and it does that work better once stabilisation is in place.

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.

In the Gulf: confidential addiction help for Kuwait, online from London.

Dr Jacquet worked inside residential treatment for close to a decade and supervises clinicians in residential centres today, so he knows what that setting does well and where it falls short. Where residential care is the right answer, he will say so at assessment. Where it is not, or where a person cannot step away from their life without cost, this is the same clinical depth delivered privately.

Also available: addiction therapist in London.