Boarding School Syndrome: The psychological trauma of the 'privileged' child
BY JOY SCHAVERIEN (2013)
Boarding School Syndrome is an analysis of the trauma of the 'privileged' child sent to boarding school at a young age. Innovative and challenging, Joy Schaverien offers a psychological analysis of the long-established British and colonial preparatory and public boarding school tradition. Richly illustrated with pictures and the narratives of adult ex-boarders in psychotherapy, the book demonstrates how some forms of enduring distress in adult life may be traced back to the early losses of home and family. Developed from clinical research and informed by attachment and child development theories ‘Boarding School Syndrome’ is a new term that offers a theoretical framework on which the psychotherapeutic treatment of ex-boarders may build.
Divided into four parts, History: In the Name of Privilege; Exile and Healing; Broken Attachments: A Hidden Trauma, and The Boarding School Body, the book includes vivid case studies of ex-boarders in psychotherapy. Their accounts reveal details of the suffering endured: loss, bereavement and captivity are sometimes compounded by physical, sexual and psychological abuse. Here, Joy Schaverien shows how many boarders adopt unconscious coping strategies including dissociative amnesia resulting in a psychological split between the 'home self' and the 'boarding school self'. This pattern may continue into adult life, causing difficulties in intimate relationships, generalized depression and separation anxiety amongst other forms of psychological distress.
Boarding School Syndrome demonstrates how boarding school may damage those it is meant to be a reward and discusses the wider implications of this tradition. It will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, Jungian analysts, psychotherapists, art psychotherapists, counsellors and others interested in the psychological, cultural and international legacy of this tradition including ex-boarders and their partners.
Stiff Upper Lip: Secrets, Crimes and the Schooling of a Ruling Class
BY ALEX RENTON (2017)
'A brave and necessary book'—GUARDIAN
'Shocking, gripping and sobering'—SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
From the author: "This is the story of generations of parents, Britain’s richest and grandest, who believed that being miserable at school was necessary to make a good and successful citizen. Childish suffering was a price they accepted for the preservation of their class, and their entitlement. The children who were moulded by this misery and abuse went on—as they still do—to run Britain’s public institutions and private companies."
No other society sends its young boys and girls away to school to prepare them for a role in the ruling class. Beating, bullying, fagging, cold baths, vile food and paedophile teachers are just some of the features of this elite education, and, while some children loved boarding school, others now admit to suffering life-altering psychological damage.
Stiff Upper Lip exposes the hypocrisy, cronyism and conspiracy that are key to understanding the scandals over abuse and neglect in institutions all over the world.
Award-winning investigative journalist Alex Renton went to three traditional boarding schools. Drawing on those experiences, and the vivid testimony of hundreds of former pupils, he has put together a compelling history, important to anyone wondering what shaped the people who run Britain in the twenty-first century.
The Making of Them: The British Attitude to Children and the Boarding School System
BY NICK DUFFELL (2000)
At the dawn of the 21st century British society is still shaped by a private education system devised to gentrify the Victorian middle classes and produce gentlemen to run the Empire. Yet it is not on the political agenda. It is rarely the subject of public debate, and we remain blind to its psychological implications. Can we afford to go on ignoring this issue? Will we continue to sacrifice the welfare of our children to satisfy our antiquated social aspirations?
Why do the British still send their children away to boarding school? What are the attitudes underpinning this practice which mystifies foreigners? What does it mean for a child to be sent away from home and immediately have to survive in an unfamiliar custom-ridden world, without love, family life or privacy? Will it be ‘the making of him’, or will it be a trauma from which he may never recover?
In this thought-provoking book psychotherapist and ex-boarder Nick Duffell reveals the bewildering dilemmas confronting the boarding school child, and discovers a dark secret at the heart of the British psyche. Drawing on more than a decade of working with Boarding School Survivors, he describes the process towards living beyond ‘strategic survival’, and offers pointers towards a philosophy of education which honours the needs and the intelligence of the natural child.
The Lost Boys: A memoir of survival, silence and the system that failed generations
BY ANGUS BELL (2026)
"An unflinching memoir exposing the hidden world of institutional cruelty, where sociopaths are created and sent out into our families, relationships, and workplaces." —Mary Turner Thomson, Author of 'The Psychopath'
At the age of ten, Angus Bell was sent to an elite British boarding school [Loretto School, near Edinburgh]—promised a life of privilege, achievement and excellence. But beyond the ivy-covered walls and manicured lawns he discovered a brutal hierarchy in which innocence, empathy and individuality were crushed.
The Lost Boys is the harrowing and unforgettable story of surviving eight years of daily cruelty, sadism and violence, and a decades-long battle for truth, justice and recovery.
Told with unsparing honesty, this true-crime memoir is more than a personal account; it is a devastating exposé of a system that left generations of children carrying its scars.
Raw, courageous, and ultimately triumphant, The Lost Boys will break your heart, open your eyes, and inspire you to challenge the silence that allows abuse to continue.
