Individual Counselling in Hong Kong
Because "I'm just tired" has been going on for a while now
Max Hogan Counselling
Loneliness is an Epidemic
One in six people worldwide is lonely.
Among young adults it is closer to one in five.
Source: WHO Commission on Social Connection, 2025In 2025 the World Health Organization put social disconnection alongside smoking and air pollution as a health risk, linking it to around 871,000 deaths a year.
You are not unusual and you are NOT being dramatic.
Hong Kong is one of the densest cities on earth and also somehow one of the easiest places to be lonely in.
When Nothing Is Wrong Enough to Explain It
You have a job. You have people. On paper the week is full.
And still there's a flatness you can't account for, or an anxiety that used to attach itself to something specific and now just runs in the background all the time.
Maybe you're tired in a way sleep doesn't fix. Maybe you've noticed you haven't had a real conversation in weeks. Maybe something happened a while ago and you handled it well, and you're only now realising you never actually felt it.
Nothing here is dramatic enough to justify making a phone call. That's exactly what makes it hard to talk about.
You don't need a crisis to qualify for this. Most of the people I see are functioning perfectly well and quietly wondering how long they can keep it up.
WHAT THERAPY ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE
If your image of therapy is lying on a couch while someone asks about your mother, I get why you're skeptical.
Therapy with me is a conversation. A direct one.
I'm integrative, which means I pull from what fits rather than what's tidy. Person-centered, humanistic, and cognitive behavioral (CBT), mostly. Psychodynamic where it fits.
I'll push back when I think it matters, because that's what respect looks like in this kind of relationship. I'm going to ask hard questions, call out the patterns I see, and push you to go deeper than the surface-level answers you give everyone else.
We'll talk about what's actually going on. Why you're feeling lonely. Why your relationship feels like a minefield. Why you keep reaching for the thing you promised yourself you'd quit.
Why nothing feels like enough even though you've built everything you were supposed to.
And we'll figure out what to do about it. Not someday. Now.
And we'll figure out what to do about it. Not someday. Now.
What I Help With
Anxiety that stopped being situational
It used to attach to something specific. Now it's just the weather.
Loneliness
A full calendar and nobody who knows the whole story.
Addiction
Alcohol, substances, porn, gambling, work. The thing you can't put down.
Burnout
Career exhaustion, identity loss, and the 'now what?' question
Making friends as an adult.
Especially in a city where a third of your people leave every summer.
Identity
Who you are when the job, the country, or the role that answered that question changes.
Depression that doesnt look like depression
Irritability, exhaustion, going through the motions competently.
Grief and Aging Parents, 12 time zones away
Including the kinds nobody sends flowers for. A marriage, a career, a country, a version of yourself. Along with the guilt of being far away.
Why This Work
I spent a decade building something that looked right and felt wrong.
Biotech and business. I was good at it. And somewhere in there I stopped recognising myself in the life I'd built.
So I changed it. New country, new career, and a long stretch in the middle where I had no idea whether I'd made an enormous mistake.
That doesn't make me an expert in your situation and I won't pretend otherwise. But I won't be surprised by anything you tell me about the strangeness of dismantling a life that was working on paper.
I've also done the expat thing properly. Arriving somewhere with no context and no people, rebuilding a social life from nothing, and being far away when things happened at home that I should have been present for.
I know what that costs. It comes up more often in this room than almost anything else.
The other thing I believe, and I believe it from the inside, is that the story you tell about yourself can be rewritten.
We all carry a version of who we are, what we deserve, and what's possible. Some of it was authored by people who didn't have our interests at heart, and some by experiences that taught us the wrong lesson efficiently.
A problem-saturated story is very good at editing out the evidence against it. Part of my job is noticing the exceptions you've stopped counting.
2Some of the strongest people I work with can't see their own resilience, because they've been surviving so long that it stopped registering as anything remarkable.
Fees block:
55 minutes: HKD 1,200
Online sessions, or in person, central across Hong Kong and the region.