Boarding school is deeply ingrained in British culture, strongly associated with privilege, power, and politics. But what about the potential harms done to children sent away from home at such young ages, into institutions that often concealed terrible abuses of power? Remarkably, this question wasn't really asked loudly until recent decades.
A key player in the development of that important conversation was Jungian psychoanalyst Joy Schaverien, who has sadly died this month.
Schaverien coined the term 'Boarding School Syndrome' in a paper for the British Medical Journal in 2011 after noting that her clients who went to boarding school were all presenting with similar and distinct issues in adulthood. She wrote several books on the subject, most notably Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the Privileged Child in 2015.
Prior to training as a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist she worked in the NHS psychiatry and psychotherapy departments. She held posts in universities, including being course leader of the Master’s programme in Art Psychotherapy at the University of Hertfordshire and a founder member of the staff team at the University of Sheffield Art Psychotherapy programme.
Ex-boarder, investigative journalist and author of Stiff Upper Lip Alex Renton told us: "Joy Schaverien was a friend, a colleague and an inspiration. Her vast empathy and emotional intelligence combined with professional brilliance to help me and numerous others understand the traumas that resulted from our childhoods. Psychology and psychotherapy will remember her as the practitioner who coined the phrase Boarding School Syndrome - an act that in itself brought comfort to tens of thousands who had been suffering the after-effects of such an education alone, riven by shame or self-recrimination.
"Her book with the same title has become standard reading, along with Nick Duffell’s work, for both survivors and practitioners. With Nick, she spawned a hugely important school of psychotherapeutic work that addresses C-PTSD resulting from the neglect, attachment fracture and active abuses that so often comes with exposure to a boarding school regime. Very importantly Joy taught me, as a journalist, to look beyond sexual abuse of children in boarding schools: it rarely features in her published case studies: the point is that living without love and adequate supports, often in fear and confusion, as a child abandoned to the care of paid strangers can be as damaging or more than physical abuse. That’s why she campaigned with us to end early boarding, a uniquely British phenomenon whose harms and long legacies she so vividly and generously laid out for us."
I had the pleasure of interviewing Joy for Welldoing in 2023. With all her years of experience as a psychotherapist behind her, I found her warm, clearheaded and insightful, and eager to keep up the conversation that she'd dedicated so many years to. You can watch the interview here:
We have a good number of therapists on the Welldoing directory who specialise in working with boarding school survivors. You can find them here, using the filters to narrow down your search.
