The long read: For the ultra-wealthy and the super-famous, regular therapy won’t do
For the ultra-wealthy and the super-famous, regular therapy won’t dof the sky is clear, it is possible to lean out of the windows of Paracelsus Recovery, a luxury rehabilitation clinic in Zurich, and gaze along the lake to the Alps in the distance. It is the kind of view, of blue water and white peaks, that promises immediate rejuvenation, a purity close to holiness.
Mowlik, 39, is the kind of person who narrates his life as he lives it, a sure sign of someone who has undergone a great deal of therapy. Knowing I’d come from London, he told me he’d lived in various parts of the city: Covent Garden, Bayswater, St Katharine’s Dock. He liked to move around, restless by nature. “Today I believe there is no home,” he said. “Home is a feeling.”
A short stroll from Turner’s home, in the lakeside neighbourhood of Kusnacht, is the house of Carl Jung, a grand, cream villa where the psychoanalyst lived for most of his life. In the late 1920s, Jung treated an alcoholic American businessman, Rowland Hazard III, for several months. After Hazard started drinking again, Jung told him he would only recover if he had some kind of spiritual awakening.
From the start, Merzeder told me, clients presented challenges she had never encountered during her career in Switzerland’s public health system. Often, they arrived with multiple prescriptions, the result of overtreatment by competing private doctors who hadn’t read each other’s notes. She recalled a younger patient, “a princess”, who’d been seen by the best American professor in paediatric psychiatry, and turned up “loaded with pills”.
It aspires to appear effortless, such opulence, the labour that enables it taking place out of sight. The housekeeper, Izabela Borowska-Violante, and chef, Moritz von Hohenzollern, usually turn up to work before a client has woken. As I wandered round the perfect rooms, trying not to touch anything, wishing my backpack wasn’t quite so filthy, they emerged from the staff quarters in the apartment as if they had been waiting there in repose.
Psychological recovery, whether you are extremely rich or not, is hard work. Paracelsus’s lead psychiatrist, Thilo Beck, is one of the most prominent in Zurich. A softly spoken man with a shaved head, enormous white trainers and a cool, unshockable air, Beck splits his time between Paracelsus and Arud, one of the largest non-profit outpatient addiction clinics in Switzerland.
When Mowlik realised he was close to self-destruction, he went to rehab, first in Florida, then several more times until he landed at Paracelsus. Once recovered, he joined Gerber’s team. Mowlik’s passion was to befriend the clients, often travelling with them to Provence, Monaco, Milan. He’d tell his story and they’d share theirs in turn. “Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s sad,” he said, “because I experienced a lot of sad things.” He had overdosed more than once.
Danuta Siemek, the live-in therapist, told me that the principle of her delicate relationship with a client was to treat them with “unconditional positive regard”. She accepts them without qualification. That’s not to say a client is never challenged, but “when we challenge them too much”, explained Gerber, “we could create a lose-lose situation. They pack their bags and piss off.
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