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Ultra-exclusive, ‘single-client’ mental health treatment and rehabilitation centres are one of many new micro-industries that have sprung up to serve the super-rich.

Paracelsus Recovery, a luxury rehabilitation clinic in Zurich, Switzerland, is one of the most expensive rehabs in the world.

Treatments at this Alps-lined clinic cost between 95 000 to 120 000 Swiss francs (around R2 million and R2,5 million) a week for the typical six- to eight-week stay.

The clients are typically members of Middle Eastern royal families, self-made billionaires, movie and sports stars, or the troubled children of all these folks, who have inherited their wealth and its subsequent burdens.

As soon as you walk through the door, you are made to feel like you are the most important person in the world, as the team of between 15 and 20 psychiatrists, doctors, nurses, yoga teachers, masseuses, nutritionists, private chefs, hypnotherapists, and trauma therapists work to make you feel better.

It’s not that the suffering of the super-rich is more complicated than that of anyone else, relents Jan Gerber, the chief executive of the clinic, to The Guardian, it’s just that regular rehab simply would not work.

“If you put a billionaire in a group setting, even with well-off middle-class people, they will not be able to relate to each other,” Gerber told me. They are not like the rest of us, these people; their lives and minds have been transformed by their fortunes.

One former live-in therapist at a Swiss clinic said that this dynamic of being the most fascinating person in the room is “a blessing and a curse”.

Ah yes, besides the facility scheduling patients’ days so that they feel like the whole place revolves around them and their unique and cherished problems – something called a “one client at a time” rehab – each patient also gets a lived-in therapist:

“A very sacred relationship,” said Danuta Siemek, who has been in the role for a year. Once assigned to a client, she is with them for the duration of their stay. She will eat with them, talk to them whenever they feel like it, take care of them if they are having a panic attack at 4am. It is intense and intimate work, a dynamic that surprised other psychotherapists I spoke to, used to the more conventional format of strictly boundaried, weekly 50-minute sessions.

Gerber says the market for this kind of luxury therapy experience is only growing. The global number of ultra-high net worth individuals, those worth more than $50 million, grew from 174 800 to 264 000 from 2019 to 2021:

According to Gerber, people in that wealth bracket, despite being financially buttressed against countless difficulties, are three to five times more likely to suffer from a mental illness or substance abuse problem than the average. Given that Paracelsus only accepts 30 to 40 clients a year, the pool is clearly large enough to keep the clinic busy.

These single-client rehabs are popping up all around the world, with clinics in Mallorca (The Balance), Ireland (Rosglas), London (Addcounsel), and another in Zurich (Calda).

All in all, The Guardian provides a fascinating delve into how the super-wealthy do therapy and recovery. Otherwise, VICE also took a gander down the Paracelsus lane:

I don’t buy it this whole shindig though – becoming a better person simply can’t be served on a silver platter.

[source:guardian]