In late 2022, The Times’s Luxx Magazine looked inside a discreet corner of the recovery world: the clinics treating executives and ultra-wealthy individuals for whom burnout had become an occupational hazard. John Naish’s piece, Burnout Clinics for Billionaire CEOs, surveyed the small field of operators working at this level. Istana was among them, and the magazine spoke to two of our team.
What the article found
Naish’s subject was a particular kind of person — running companies, carrying dynasties, reaching a depletion that no ordinary holiday touches — and the few places equipped to treat them properly, away from public view.
He spoke with Agathe Fay, who leads the complementary therapy teams across our villas in Bali, Barbados and Ibiza. She described burnout as a feeling of “not-enoughness” and perfectionism in lives crowded with productivity and noise, and the work of recovery as learning to disconnect and slow down. Surfing, she told him, is one of the ways in: fun, healing and meditative, and a lesson in letting go for people who feel they need to control everything. As she put it, you cannot control the waves.
The article also quoted our founder, Ian Ross-Smith, on what makes the single-client model different. He never knows quite what will walk off the plane, he said, and much of the therapy is helping people rediscover old passions, find new ones, and learn to laugh again after years of misery. On the work itself: “the transformation — because it’s one-to-one — is extraordinary.”
Read the article
Read the full article at The Times.
If what the article describes is familiar — in your own life or someone in your care — WhatsApp us or request a call. We respond personally, promptly and in complete confidence.
