This page hosts tributes and reflections for the late Joy Schaverien. You can make a submission to add to the page via the FORM HERE
To read more about Joy and her work, you can visit our blog post dedicated to her life and work HERE.
To see a collection of Joy’s work, podcasts, materials and books you can visit a resource section HERE
Alex Renton – Ex-boarder, investigative journalist and author of Stiff Upper Lip
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.
Piers Cross – Ex-boarder, boarding school and leadership coach
I felt very sad to hear the news of Joy’s passing. I met Joy several times over the years and I always found her to be such a warm, kind and supportive presence.
I interviewed her in 2021 for my podcast. I felt very nervous before we began yet she was so gentle and inspiring.
We met again in 2023 to interview her for the documentary, Boarding On Insanity. Her depth of knowledge and empathy made it a powerful interview and became an important part of the film.
What I loved about her is how passionate she was in supporting boarding school survivors even though she didn’t board herself. She had our backs. And that was so powerful. She will be missed. Thank you, Joy.
Chris Braitch – Ex-boarder, Seen & Heard Co-Founder and Emotional Health Coach
I felt deep sadness and loss to hear of Joy’s passing. We spoke in February and agreed to do a podcast together in March, I was really excited to continue to discuss her seminal work on Boarding School Syndrome. Sadly we weren’t able to record that, but her previous support for our work to speak to University counselling services around Boarding School Syndrome was so helpful.
On a deeply personal level, she was to me the ‘the Mother’ of the Boarding School Survivors movement, as Nick Duffell was ‘the Father’. For myself and many ex-boarders who had their familial connections severed through disconnection and dissociation, there is a deep bond with Joy and Nick that runs deeper than their professional work. They kept showing up to speak out, with love and consistency, for well over a decade, and they continued to make time for those that needed support.
Their work gave legitimacy, language and focus to something that lay beneath the surface of British and colonial society and history. Many others like me then stepped onto the trail they blazed to take up the work to support others and bring this important conversation into the light.
I am eternally grateful for her life, work and energy.
Cathy Wield – Ex-boarder, Doctor and Author
I remember how validated I felt when reading Joy Schaverien’s book ‘Boarding School Syndrome’ and how well she articulated the problems that boarders faced both at the time and later in life. When I came to write my memoir ‘Unshackled Mind; a doctor’s story of trauma, liberation & healing’, I had some correspondence with her when requesting to use some quotes from her book. She was generous to a tee, and I only wish that I had had the chance to meet her in person. Joy lit a touch paper, and her work will continue – of course, her wisdom will be sorely missed by those in the BSS community, but more so by her friends and family, to whom I send my sincere condolences.
Thurstine Bassett – Ex-boarder, Author
Joy was already an accomplished psychoanalyst and author when her work with clients led her to coin the term ‘Boarding School Syndrome’. As a professor she brought academic credibility to those of us who sought to expose the emotional damage of boarding schools. This was enhanced because she was also not an ex-boarder herself so had no personal ‘axe to grind’. Her 2015 book opened the door to others so that to date Routledge have published 10 further books on the topic. Working with her was also a joy. She will live on in the hearts and minds of many boarding school survivors.
Simon Partridge – Ex-boarder, writer
Joy had a special place in my journey to understand my upper-class background and boarding experience. I was very sad to learn of her passing and it was an honour to be invited to her funeral.
By chance in 2005 I came across a very brief abstract of her early paper “Boarding school: The trauma of the ‘privileged’ child” (2004). Those words “trauma of the ‘privileged’ child” lifted a load of shame; the abstract rang many bells. I got in touch and she put me onto Nick Duffell from which followed one of his workshops, opening further doors. So Joy, thank you so much for your pioneering gift to those who suffered boarding.
Nick Duffell – Ex-boarder, Psychotherapist, author
When Joy contacted me in 2002 my life completely changed. Before this wise and talented professor joined me in exposing the psychology of boarding I was quite alone with it, seeming like a cranky psychotherapist with an axe to grind. Joy’s huge discovery was that the fathers of British psychoanalysis had been sent away, so the techniques of working with splitting (why I had to study this) may have arise from ex-boarder understanding of the psyche. Joy was very experienced, having been an artist, and art-therapist and a Jungian, responsible for transforming art therapy into a respected sophisticated discipline. She was also a master of case study , so her papers and books read easily. She was a true friend to me. Can’t believe she’s gone.
Carl Chambers
Joy’s simple comment on an podcast about the challenge of having a bath for a boarding school survivor had a profound impact on me. It was Revelatory. When I shared with my wife it was as if her eyes were opened too, to see what she’d always seen in me but never understood. So grateful.
Philip Bennett
Remembering Joy for all she did to relieve some of the damage done at BS. She helped me here in Australia to find a suitable therapist (one that understood BS syndrome), and that was transformative. RIP. ♥️
Karen Macmillan – Counsellor
Hearing Joy talk about boarding school syndrome on the radio opened the door for me to understanding the trauma of boarding. Like many, I owe her a profound debt of gratitude for her intelligent, sensitive and powerful writing and speaking on the subject. She really did give us the words and a frame for understanding our experience in the face of so much opposition and denial. An inspirational, courageous woman and true ally.
Anonymous with gratitude
Joy’s work on Boarding School Syndrome woke me up from a world of confusion and pain. As a now ex-partner of an ex-boarder, her words unmasked the reality of my relationship and stopped me from internalising the blame and gaslighting I had experienced. She was a huge part of my decision to become a psychotherapist and I will forever be grateful to her.
Jane Barclay – Psychotherapist
Never has a phrase rung so cleanly, in stereo, between my ears: ‘Trauma of the Privileged Child’… The opening bars of the final chorus of Bach’s St John’s Passion come close; the solo bass opening of Faurés ‘Libera Me’. The first note of Max Jury’s ‘Home’. These all have me tingling in soul-recognition. A deep truth is what I recognised, too, in Joy Shaverien’s title for a talk she was presenting in Oxford, around 2008.
I drove from Exeter via my public school of five years. I had no idea I was angry, or felt anything much about the place or my time there, despite many years in therapy. I had more pressing matters.
But I was determined, by arriving two hours early, parking and finding a bus, to follow the call put out by Prof. Schaverien. I didn’t know her name then, let alone her reputation as a therapist and academic. Within two years of that day, I was a trainee of hers, Nick Duffell’s and Helena Løvendal’s, on the year’s course ‘Boarding School Experience’.
From my first one-to-one contact, I experienced Joy as one of the least ego-driven people I’ve known. Confident, yes, in her surety that to board was traumatic for every child, (summarised succinctly by her ABC – Abandonment, Bereavement, Captivity – and in her knowledge regarding trauma and it’s impact, as she spoke and wrote of over and over. Strongly yet not forcibly passionate. Quietly holding. I met her at Boarding Concern conferences (now Boarding School Concern), where she took part as key speaker or co-panelist with equal, again, firm holding conviction. The same tone that she wrote in. Joy, like Helena, was not a former boarder. She therefore had, and claimed, the advantage of not-normalising what a boarder-therapist – as myself and MANY others – can, and by so going inadvertently collude with the client sitting opposite.
My first, strong, memory is when she asked, at the opening of her talk, for a show of hands by the approximately 200 therapists in the room who had been to boarding school: I saw about 85% of hands raised, mine included. Not just me, then… and enrolled in the next two-weekend workshops run by Boarding School Survivors.
My last, memory is standing by the bookstall at the Boarding Concern Conference in 2016 or 17, Joy and I separately opting for quiet during the lunch hour. After listening to me say I found the whole day, section by section, evoked re-play of school close to re-traumatising, so at least by escaping for lunch I could find a healing moment, Joy told me she wasn’t altogether comfortable at big gatherings – and in that moment our hearts touched.
And, writing this, with Ludovico Einaudi and Daniel Hope playing ‘Experience’ in my earpods, I weep – for Joy’s far too young death, and for the Privilege of coming within her orbit. Thank you, dear Medicine Woman.
