I finally got to go to rehab
My weekend inside a £40k-a-week clinic in the Alps and a plethora of recommendations
Every now and again, a commission comes along that reminds me why I'm sticking it out in this absolute mess of an industry.
Last week, I flew to Geneva to spend a weekend at a bougie £40k-a-week rehab - perhaps "elite" would be a better adjective - for Tatler.
This was a thrill on many counts. Firstly, I have always secretly wished I had gone to rehab.
I am aware of how mad that sounds so please hear me out. I got sober through 12-step meetings and really, I'm very thankful I didn't have to go to rehab because it's seriously expensive and - let's be real - my parents would have had to pay for it so I'm grateful I never had to ask them to shell out that kind of money to help me get well. However, I know many people who did go to rehab and I lap up their tales of arriving at a facility on their knees, the camaraderie of being with other people also on their knees trying to stagger upright, the tales of ill-advised love affairs and petty rows breaking out over the most mundane things - one friend regaled me with stories of his time inside a mad West London rehab where fights erupted over accusations of stealing milk out of minifridges and where all the patients were, apparently, sleeping together. I've always imagined rehab as a strange twist on boarding school, filled with attentive staff who want the best for you and cleared out of anything that might do you harm. I have heard more than one friend say, when life gets busy, "I sometimes wish I could just go back to rehab."1
Secondly, the chance to poke my nose around a facility that usually charges more than the average UK salary for a week's stay and caters to the 0.0000000000001 per cent was, to me, a dream. I'm a fundamentally curious creature and I want to know how other people live - particularly people whose experiences are so far removed from my own. Finally, this was my first piece for Tatler - a magazine that I hold in high esteem mainly because it published my favourite piece of journalism, AA Gill's description of his own stay in rehab - so to get a chance to write something, a little related I suppose, for the same publication felt like a kismet moment.
And talking of kismet moments, what do you think of this strange coincidence! I had only been to Switzerland once before, as a little girl, to go to a family wedding. I have this very clear memory of watching fireworks explode over the Alps from a wooden balcony. When I got the address of the rehab, I noted it was in the same town as the hotel had been (Montreux) and when I saw the building in a photograph - a chalet with wooden balconies and a turret and a little red-and-white Swiss flag - it looked startlingly similar to my memory of the hotel. I told myself the architecture was probably typical of the region. However, as we drove up the mountain to the rehab, I had the strong feeling that I had done that drive before. When we arrived, someone asked what the rehab had been before it was a rehab and the answer came, "a disused hotel".
At that point, I just knew it was the same place. I called my dad and told him my theory and he said, "Well, is there a funicular [a kind of mountain tram], the hotel was right by a funicular?"
Guys, the rehab clinic was right by a funicular. It was the very same building I had been in as a child. Isn't that strange? What are the chances of visiting Switzerland only twice - once as a child going to a wedding staying in a hotel, once as a journalist on a job staying in a rehab - and being in the same building?
I choose to take coincidences like this as little signposts from my Higher Power - God, Allah, the universe, the cosmos, whatever you want to call it - a reassuring nudge that I'm in the right place.
You can read all about my stay in Clinic Les Alpes here but here are my key takeaways:
- The scenery is so spectacular that it is otherworldly. The view from the terrace outside my bedroom was so unreal that when I uploaded a photograph of it to Instagram - very bad rehab behaviour - an alert popped up asking if I had created the image using AI. In other words, the authorities at Mark Zuckerburg's app deemed the view too perfect to have been created by the hand of nature - and I don't blame them. The Alpine backdrop was so sublime that I never got used to it - every time I saw it out of the window, I was taken back afresh.
- The clinic was super luxurious - with a swimming pool and jacuzzi carved out of the mountainside, a spa offering multiple treatments, an English country house decor of chintzy sofas, biscuit-coloured carpets and floral wallpaper - but it was also a fully licensed medical facility and sometimes the combination was quite jarring. As I wrote in the piece, there is a 24/7 nursing station and detox rooms with alarm buttons by the beds, panes of glass in the ensuite walls so the staff can always see the patient and windows that don't open so baggies can't be passed in. The doors are locked so you can leave, but only by discharging yourself. The mix of luxury and medical was difficult to get my head around. I also did feel like I was being watched - and, at rehab, of course you're being watched, that's kind of the whole point.
- In Victorian times, middle class tuberculosis sufferers flocked to the Swiss Alps in the hopes that the mountain air would help their ravaged lungs recover. Nowadays, the super rich are flocking there (CLA is not the only elite rehab in the area) to recover from a variety of mental conditions including addiction, burnout, depression, anxiety, eating disorders etc.
- I tried out a whole range of therapies - the standard psychoanalytical sessions, as well as art therapy, equine therapy and hypnosis - and it opened my mind to the different kinds of therapy out there. At the moment, I'm really off standard psychoanalysis. I left my therapist in January becauseI don't want to spend an hour every week talking about my childhood. I doubted that the sessions were helping me and even started to suspect that they were making my mental state worse. But I really enjoyed art therapy. The therapist, Sarah, instructed me to draw a life-size silhouette of myself and then paint it, and as I did so, she gently asked me questions about my life. I found that being absorbed in the action of painting made it easier to talk about things. At the end of the session, I stepped back and looked over at painted "Issy" and had the strong feeling: I should be nicer to her. Seeing her in front of me made me think of all the horrid things I say to her and, how, she doesn't deserve them. Is that a breakthrough? Let's say yes. Trying that range of therapies made me realise that there's more out there than sitting in a room talking about your parents - and I wouldn't be averse to a weekly art therapy session at some point in the future.
- The Clinic takes a "holistic" approach to recovering which means that as well as treating the mind, they believe in treating the body as well, which is why there are massages and a gym and a swimming pool and many of the therapies involve a focus on the body. Usually I would roll my eyes at that but it is interesting how important I consider yoga to be to my recovery. I do believe that my yoga practice is an extension of my recovery. Just as I can't imagine life without 12-step meetings, I can't imagine life without a regular yoga practice. (Yes, I have become one of THOSE people). And it's no secret that people in recovery often become fanatical about exercise. I went to a recovery-focussed boxing session yesterday and can feel a new obsession brewing.
- It is terrifying how quickly you become accustomed to people doing things for you. At the Clinic, the staff are unfailingly polite and accommodating and just plain old nice and gentle - the founder told me how important he considered gentleness in recovery. They are on hand to help you with anything. Any time I was lost, someone immediately popped up to point me in the right direction. Housekeeping suggested someone help me "close my suitcase" when it came time to leave. I muddied my trainers on a mountain walk and Flavio, the sports educator, gave them to housekeeping. Back in my room, I looked around and there they were, spotless, in the corner. I have no idea how they got them done and deposited in my room without me knowing about it. Every lunch and dinner I sat down to a three-course meal cooked for me. At first, all this service made me uneasy. But within a day - I'm telling you - I was happily padding up and down the marble halls in my complimentary terry towel and slippers, fully adjusted to being looked after. In my research for writing the piece, I read this fantastic article by Sophie Elmhirst - 'One billionaire at a time': inside the Swiss clinics where the super-rich go for rehab - and she described how quickly you get used to being catered to with the attention of a whole clinical team focussed on you:
"It has a particular effect, being the centre of attention of multiple professionals... During the nutritionist's assessment, I started to wonder if my dietary habits were in fact uniquely fascinating. A soft slide into narcissism seemed unavoidable."
- As fabulously luxurious the Clinic was, I did get a taste of the isolation of the super-rich. As delightful as it was to be waited on hand-and-foot for a weekend, I don't really miss it. I like deciding what I do with my days and not feeling hampered which seems to come along with being pampered. I suspect if you are rich enough to stay at the Clinic Les Alpes, your life is quite hampered - for privacy or security reasons or whatever. And while it's hard to feel sympathy for anyone who can afford a £40k-a-week stay anywhere, addiction can make any life a misery. If you doubt that, think of Eva and Hans Rausing Jr, the Tetrapak billionaire couple who met in rehab but couldn't stay clean with Eva famously busted for attempting to smuggle crack into the US embassy. When she died of cocaine abuse in their home, Hans Jr simply covered her body in tarpaulin, told staff not to go into the room and continued using with the dead body of his wife lying there undetected for two months. By the time authorities found the body, they could only identify Eva thanks to her pacemaker. Surely no one wants to live like that.
- Leaving rehab must be hard. Even I felt a little nervous at the thought of being exiled from the Clinic and facing security at Geneva airport - and I had only been there for a weekend, wasn't newly clean facing a world where I could finally get my hands on my substance of choice after a 28-day stint of enforced abstinence. I decided that post-rehab I'd try to eat better, inspired by my healthy meals at the Clinic. I bought Swiss chocolate bars at the airport as presents for my parents, a friend and my flatmate. I landed back in London and waited for the car that had been kindly arranged to take me home. It was running late. I was bored. I caved and bought Kettle Chips and a chocolate bar from Costa. I gobbled them up then got in the car and felt anxious about the work I had to do that night, bored of the drive, and ripped into one of the chocolate bars - which had been meant for my flatmate. I ate it all and felt immediate regret and recrimination - now she wouldn't have a nice present, I hadn't needed to eat the whole thing, I felt gross at having so much sugar. “You're a horrible, horrible girl,” I thought - something I wouldn't have said to my life-size portrait in art therapy. And just like that, the calm of the Alpine retreat evaporated, I was back in the real world, and I'd caved. Of course eating a chocolate bar was hardly the worst thing in the world but it was terrifying to see how easily and quickly my post-rehab intentions deserted me.
Recommendations
I'm sorry these recommendations are v heavy on journalism-is-collapsing-and-let-me-tell-you-about-it vibes!
Everything I've worked out about writing
I enjoyed this run-through of writing tips by Rebecca Reid, particularly her point about "non-writing-writing". She says that most of the story is worked out in the back of her brain while she is doing something else - side note, Coco Mellors who wrote the fantastic Cleopatra and Frankenstein also said that she takes herself out for "imagination walks" and when writing is hard it's usually because she's not been doing enough daydreaming. Rebecca says the trick is to work out what activities allow the story to cook away in the back of your mind and what activities don't.
"Walking, ironing, cleaning, cooking and food shopping all promote it. Watching TikTok, napping, doing admin and looking after my child prevent it."
She also writes about how knocks to her confidence - what sounds like a really horrid stint at Grazia magazine - left her pretty much unable to write for 18 months. It continually astounds me how much of writing is a confidence trick. Whenever I write for a new editor, writing the first piece is ghastly. I probably spend twice the amount of time on it than I should, agonise over each sentence, convince myself that it's wooden and stilted.
I have a sneaky theory that writing is like life in many ways and that, as in life, if you've got confidence you can get away with pretty much anything but if you've lost that confidence, everything becomes slower, harder and much less likely to come off.
exactly 2009 words on art and loneliness
So I discovered this Substack by Marie Le Conte when my clever friend Katie sent me this piece because it articulated exactly how she and I have been feeling. Le Conte explains that she has been feeling lonely for obvious reasons (she works alone, lives alone, doesn't have a partner) and that she has found herself seeking solace in art. I v recommend reading the piece if you feel it may speak to you but here are the bits that spoke to me:
"This isn’t meant to be a sob story, by the way. I know why I’m lonely. Having a job would make me less lonely, but most journalism jobs currently available would have me work more than I currently do, in order to earn less money than I currently make. I do not want that. Living in a flatshare again would make me less lonely, but I am messy and most people are irked by messy people, and I just enjoy prancing about in my pants too much to live with friends and strangers...
...In short: life is about choices and compromises, and while I do not regret any of the choices and compromises I have made over the past few years, the unfortunate truth is that they have, as a group, coalesced into what is quite a lonely life. It’s fine. It happens. I doubt it’ll last forever."
no one likes hacks and oh god, we do care
Another fantastic piece from Le Conte's substack - I'm going to go pretty far here and say that I think it's the best thing I've read on the decimation of journalism. We all know how grim the situation is and the news that the Evening Standard was going from daily to weekly was particularly demoralising for me as I used to do shifts there, know the journalists who are likely to be affected and the fact that you can't make a free-paper in London work is just so sad, but Le Conte delivers some home truths in this piece. She posits that while we all wring our hands about how awful the world will be without journalists speaking truth to power, the reality is that very few journalists working today are actual hard news reporters and even fewer are doing investigative deep dives.
"Most hacks could retire tomorrow and democracy, both local and global, would easily survive. We're superfluous! That's the truth we don't want to confront. It's what we hide from when we go "ooooh, but accountability", and "oooh, power going unchecked". Babe you write about online culture trends! Who are you holding accountable!"
She points out that the reason journalism is failing is because the world doesn't need us anymore. The internet and social media has taken over our job. For example, if you have a sofa to sell, you don't put an ad in your local paper anymore, you bung it up on Facebook Marketplace or Gumtree. Where you used to read reviews of films and books to decide what to spend your money on, there are plenty of credible critics offering their takes on websites and on social media that are free to access. Celebrities don't have to speak to a journalist to publicise a project or get a message out anymore, they can talk to us all directly via their Instagram account (that's why we have all those notes app apologies and far fewer statements released to the press).
"The horrid and irksome reality is that journalism is failing as an industry because the world doesn't really need us anymore. A lot of the important and worthy bits are essentially gone already, and are unlikely to come back. A lot of what we have left is fun but ultimately expendable. [Like my visit to rehab argh!]... We used to be embedded in the fabric of society and now we aren't."
Black women are leaving journalism and it's a huge loss
As you can see, I have apparently been much preoccupied with the collapse of journalism this week. This piece, by Habiba Katsha, describes how the industry-wide lay-offs have affected Black journalists. Considering that there are already way way too few Black journalists in the business - they only make up 0.2 per cent of the overall workforce in the US and UK which sounds like an absolutely shocking stat but based on my experience inside newsrooms, very very believable - this exodus is awful. It means that certain stories either won't get told or won't get told sensitively and that is awful.
Ok to lighten the palate, I'm going to leave you with a rare food recommendation...
The perfect lunch
I think I have discovered the perfect lunch, delicious but healthy and filling, requiring a pleasing amount of preparation but nothing too onerous.
Here are the elements: roasted sweet potato (cut in chunks, toss with olive oil, salt and pepper, maybe some cinnamon), edamame beans (my obsession, I buy them frozen and pour them into the roasting pan with the sweet potato for the last five minutes), kale (but no normal kale, this is my take on Deliciously Ella's kale recipe and guys, you will munch your way through a bag of kale easy if you prepare it this way: tear off all the tough stems, pour olive oil, salt and a little cider vinegar, proper massage it for three minutes, I know this sounds mad but it is essential to make it soft and delicious, then add about a tablespoon of tahini, a glug of soy sauce, a little bit of cider vinnie and give it another quick massage) and then put it all together: kale at the bottom, sweet potato and edamame, maybe I cut up some radishes and add them in, dust it all with nutritional yeast (tastes so savoury and vaguely cheese-like). Often I eat it just like this but sometimes I add a protein such as salmon (I like the ready-to-eat sweet chilli prepared fillets you can get in most of the supermarkets). It is just far and away my favourite lunch - plus the orange of the sweet potato with the green of the edamame beans is a very pleasing colour combination.
OK! That's it from me today, thank you all for reading this as ever, and I hope you have a really fantastic week xxx
Though interestingly - and this is anecdotal, I have no data to back this up - I suspect success rates among people who drag themselves to a 12-step meeting are higher than among people who go to rehab. Some people need rehab. They need to be removed from a situation if they are to get any foundation of sober time to build upon and, of course, some people need to be monitored by medical staff as they detox. I have seen people who have achieved long-lasting sobriety which began in rehab but I have also seen people who relapsed on their way home or have been treated in multiple facilities to not much avail. The issue, as I understand it from friends who have been to rehab, is that some patients at rehab are only there because they have been ordered in by a partner or a parent or their work. But even then, the strange thing is that sometimes sobriety takes hold and someone recovers. So much of how recovery works and why some people get sober and some people don't that is really, truly mysterious. However, I suspect you are far more likely to get sober if it is something you want for yourself and you're not doing it to appease someone else.