Cash-strapped Fergie's £91,000-a-week clinic for 'rich

Where does a VVIP (a very, very important person) go when they suffer a deep crisis and become a penniless near-pariah? What can possibly heal them in their hour of need, when they have nowhere to hide, and not a single soul who will offer shelter, solace and help?

I know exactly where because I have been there: the Paracelsus Recovery clinic, a rehabilitation and wellness retreat in Zurich, Switzerland, which claims to ‘heal’ the ‘ultra-wealthy’ with exclusive treatments tailored to their ‘pain’.

It’s to this bastion of privilege and luxury that Sarah Ferguson, the disgraced former Duchess of York and ‘supreme friend’ of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, fled in January, according to the Mail on Sunday last weekend. It costs £91,000 a week and provides the exclusive attention of 15 ‘leading experts’ to one – yes, just one – client at a time.

Whether Ferguson paid or received a freebie (she has appeared on the clinic’s YouTube channel in the past, and been treated for PTSD and ADHD there) is unknown. What I do know is that the clinic will have saved her life. Because it certainly saved mine.

I was flown first class on Swiss Air. From the moment you board, you’re in a bubble that is private, efficient and fiercely nurturing. On landing in Zurich, you disembark first, gently nudged to one side down a set of secret steps into a waiting Mercedes limousine which speeds your poor, broken body and soul to the arrivals building, where a VVIP liaison officer disappears with your passport: there’s no waiting in line for luggage or immigration. It’s like magic.

The Paracelsus Recovery clinic is a rehabilitation and wellness retreat in Zurich, Switzerland, which claims to ‘heal’ the ‘ultra-wealthy’ with exclusive treatments tailored to their ‘pain’.

Next, you’re led to the VVIP arrivals lounge where Jan Gerber, the suave, mid-40s founder and chief executive of Paracelsus Recovery, greets you with an espresso and the most reassuring, empathetic, non-judgemental demeanour of any man I’ve met (his father is an eminent psychiatrist; his mother a retired nurse).

Led to a waiting Bentley, your luggage safely stowed, you are now driven with Jan to an unassuming, anonymous block on the shores of Lake Zurich. The city is home to Lindt HQ, so the air smells of chocolate, yet the building itself turns out to have a deeply unsavoury past. Adolf Hitler’s accountant had an office here and the Fuhrer was a frequent visitor.

Who knows how many villains Paracelsus Recovery has sheltered since it opened in 2012? As Gerber told me, however, with the most extraordinary lack of self-awareness: ‘It’s easier to have sympathy with a starving child in Africa. To have empathy with someone rich and famous is more difficult. But I believe our empathy with a human being’s pain should not be conditional.’

Gerber coined the term ‘Succession Syndrome’.

‘In many ultra-wealthy families,’ he writes on the website, ‘the home operates more like a business than a place of connection. There’s often a strong focus on performance, success and legacy, but very little room for vulnerability.’

Andrew Mountbatten Windsor with ex-wife Sarah Fergusson at the funeral for the Duchess of Kent on September 16 2025

He believes the very rich and very poor have much in common – children are abandoned young, they have distant parents and suffer loneliness. He also told me something staggering – that he believes ‘80-90 per cent of the rich and famous have an addiction of some kind’.

Film stars are particularly damaged, apparently, and most suffer from imposter syndrome. Wealth can make a person more likely to abuse alcohol, and narcissistic personality disorder is common among his patients.

Studies have also shown that the more wealth someone acquires, the more morally ambivalent they can become. His words seem eerily prescient now.

Why do those who outwardly seem to have everything, so often become terrible people? ‘They are often isolated; they don’t know who to trust. People pretend to be their friend,’ he told me.

Next, you’re shown into a lift to be whisked to the penthouse apartment. I’d thought I’d be confined to a monastic cell, but this is like being on a five-star holiday. One floor houses a kitchen with your own Michelin-trained chef.

I was there in 2023 for a feature for YOU magazine, and even as an anorexic – the reason, along with acute anxiety due to being made bankrupt, I felt qualified to test the clinic out – I swooned over three vegan meals a day. Breakfast of dragon fruit with berries, lunch of asparagus with pine nuts, hummus and rice; dinner a knot of pasta. I also had an intravenous infusion of B12.

The clinic, although health focussed, is the height of luxury including access to the spa where England women’s football team relaxed during the World Cup

There was a huge dining table, sofas, floral displays the size of hippos, a giant screen showing Netflix, and views of yachts bobbing on the water. Upstairs, past a grand piano and a terrace, is the bedroom with a super king bed and a bathroom with every beauty unguent and toiletry imaginable, lined up with military precision. Each afternoon, a maid would arrive to iron the bed linen in case I’d sat on it.

My days were filled with physical check-ups. I was weighed, measured, given a full MRI body and brain scan, ECG (heart), and echocardiography. I had an EEG (brain), microbiome tests, genetic tests to find out if I’m likely to get Alzheimer’s, thyroid and hormone tests, and a sleep apnoea analysis. I even had epigenetic tests to detect tiny changes in my DNA to measure how I’m ageing, as well as tests for maldigestion markers and leaky gut.

I had my first ever smear test and breast exam with a gynaecologist, but even though the rigorous exams were terrifying since you worry what they might find (a bone scan revealed osteoporosis in my spine, like Swiss cheese, ironically, due to my poor diet), everyone is so smiley and it’s all so unapologetically luxe, millions of light years from the plastic chairs of the NHS, that you are emboldened. You’ll cope because everyone is the best at what they do.

Ferguson’s health will have been carefully checked, too: the link between body and mind is central to the clinic’s ethos. Every inch of my skin was scanned under a microscope for cancerous moles. With her red hair and propensity for exotic holidays, Ferguson will have been under that beady lens, too, having been diagnosed with skin cancer in 2024.

The clinic runs a series of physical check ups including body and brain scans, hormone tests, and epigenetic tests to measure aging

There are lighter activities on tap: you can be ferried to the nearby spa inside the nearby Dolder Grand Hotel, where the England women’s football team relaxed during the World Cup, or partake of in-room massages. Stefan, the in-room physiotherapist, told me that to banish bingo wings I must hold my arms out as if I were ‘a waitress, carrying a tray’. I wonder now if he said the same to the famously entitled Ferguson.

That her recent refuge has been outed will have saddened Gerber. The Bentley’s windows are tinted; the clinic’s exterior never photographed to ensure confidentiality. It is a hiding place as much as a health check.

The real star for me, among the dozen doctors who prodded me, and I’m certain Ferguson would feel the same, was Dr Thilo Beck, head of psychiatry at Zurich’s Arud Centre for Addiction Medicine, and chief psychiatrist at Paracelsus Recovery.

Beck practises ACT – acceptance and commitment therapy. The clinic also offers Dialectical Behaviour Therapy: talk therapy for high risk suicidal patients, those with substance abuse, bipolar disorder, PTSD and eating disorders.

Endlessly kind and wise, Dr Beck told me the story of Thich Quang Durc, the Buddhist monk who, in Saigon in 1963, set himself on fire in protest at persecution by the South Vietnamese government. He died with a smile on his face. He was ‘observing’ what was happening. He was detached. I’m certain Dr Beck told Ferguson this story, too: if she can learn to still her mind, block out the noise, she can endure anything, emerge stronger, feel more at peace.

I was discharged after a week with a list of recommendations – yoga, therapy, rest – and the gifts of a suitcase stuffed with supplements: vitamins B12 and D, Omega 3, red rice and on and on. I was instructed to ‘eat mindfully’, wear an Oura Ring to monitor fitness and sleep and given a limited edition Marilyn Monroe Mont Blanc pen. Gerber told me that each client receives something with personal meaning upon departure. I’m desperate to know what Ferguson hid in her suitcase.