Draft:Nick Duffell

Nick Duffell is a psychotherapist, psychohistorian and trainer, best known as the founder of ‘Boarding School Survivors’ [citation needed]. He is the author of many papers and several books claiming that elite boarding schools represent a trauma for children and socio-political handicap for nations.

His books include The Making of Them: the British Attitude to Children and the Boarding School System, Wounded Leaders: British Elitism and the Entitlement Illusion - a Psychohistory, and Trauma, Abandonment and Privilege: A guide to therapeutic work with boarding school survivors.

His first book, The Making of Them, received critical acclaim, including endorsements by the British Medical Journal [citation needed], and John le Carré [citation needed]. This book reproduced the title of a 1994 BBC film [citation needed] by Colin Luke of Mosaic Pictures, which featured Duffell’s work.

In The Making of Them, Duffell set out his findings from group therapy with 'Boarding School Survivors,' as he named adult ex-boarders. His ideas received validation following an article in 1990 in The Independent Newspaper, which received thousands of affirmative letters from the general public [citation needed].

However, he has been criticised by supporters of boarding, especially from the Boarding Schools Association [citation needed], for raising concerns that relate only to boarding in the past. Duffell’s response is that boarding schools have changed: they now have curtains, carpets and smartphones: but they still don’t have parents.

In 1996, Duffell co-founded the Centre for Gender Psychology, which offers public workshops as well as specialist training for professionals in the field of relationships, sex, and gender, with Helena Løvendal. In 2002, HarperCollins published their book Sex, Love and the Danger of Intimacy, [citation needed] which has been translated into German, Russian and Greek [significance?].

In 2001 Duffell co-founded the Association for Boarding School Survivors. Association for Boarding School Survivors This later became a national watchdog organisation, Boarding Concern [citation needed].

In 2004 he reported to the Royal College of Nursing on their concern that children from well-off families were suffering needless neglect [citation needed] and to the Australian Boarding Colloquium on how to humanise boarding schools [citation needed]. In 2008 he had talks with the back-bench Labour MP Barry Sheerman [citation needed] over the validity of the Public Schools’ charitable status considering their psychological impact, which continued in 2016 with Labour’s Shadow Minister of Mental Health, Luciana Berger. Sheerman agreeing to read questions about boarding to the House, but nothing came of this – the pro-boarding lobby is too big [WP:NPOV].

In 2014, his essay on the political ramifications of his work Wounded Leaders: British Elitism and the Entitlement Illusion - a Psychohistory appeared and introduced new neuroscience evidence for boarding as a Development Complex Trauma. The book has been endorsed by many, including Professor Stephen Porges [citation needed] and novelist Philip Pullman [citation needed]. Around the time of the Scottish Independence Referendum [relevance?], the BBC’s Newsnight Scotland interviewed Duffell on the ‘Wounded Leaders’ problem [citation needed], and his article in The Guardian, ‘Why boarding schools produce bad leaders’[1], went viral on Facebook [citation needed].

In 2015, building on Duffell’s work, Professor Joy Schaverien, a Jungian analyst, coined the word ‘Boarding School Syndrome’ [verification needed]. The problem began to gain wider recognition, especially within the helping professions [verification needed]. Trauma, Abandonment and Privilege introduced a step-by-step approach to this difficult client group [relevance?].

A contributor to the University of Surrey Human Potential Group's Dictionary of Personal Development, and to many psychological journals, Duffell has a contributed a chapter on DH Lawrence to Therapy and the Counter-tradition: The Edge of Philosophy and to The Political Self, (2016).

Duffell is committed to the development of psychohistory as a tool for understanding current world problems. His collaboration with political activist John Bunzl on SIMPOL, The Simpol Solution: Solving Global Problems Could Be Easier Than We Think , was published by Peter Owen Publishers in the UK and subsequently in a US version.

Duffell now specialises in providing specialist training for graduate psychotherapists to work with ex-boarder adults, which is one of the fastest-growing client groups, but one which also produces challenges for therapists, couple workers therapists, and working with men's issues. Increasingly, he is invited to appear on films such as one for Momentum [citation needed] and podcasts such as ‘Inside Boarding School Minds: The Journey of Strategic Survival Personalities’ [citation needed]. He also trains relationship therapists.

Nick Duffell was born in 1949 in London, lived in Germany and Switzerland as a child [significance?] and was a boarder from the age of eight. He took his degree in Sanskrit at Oxford, before teaching in an Indian boarding school. He has been a care-staff, carpenter, divorce mediator, psychotherapist and management consultant. He has two sons and three grandchildren.

Publications

The Making of Them: the British Attitude to Children and the Boarding School System, (2000) London: Lone Arrow Press. Audio version available from Audible Inc. 2016.

Dictionary of Personal Development, Eds. Gregory, J. & Tosey, P, (2001) London: Wiley-Blackwell, contributing author.

Sex, Love and the Dangers of Intimacy, with Løvendal, H., (2002) London: HarperCollins Thorsons, plus 3 foreign-language editions translated into German, Russian and Greek.

Sex, Love and the Dangers of Intimacy, with Løvendal, H., (2012) 10th Anniversary edition,  London: : Lone Arrow Press

Wounded Leaders: British Elitism and the Entitlement Illusion - a Psychohistory, (2014) London: Lone Arrow Press.

Therapy and the Counter-tradition: The Edge of Philosophy, Eds. Bazanno, M. and Webb, J., (2016) London and New York: Routledge, chapter contributor.

Trauma, Abandonment and Privilege: A guide to therapeutic work with boarding school survivors, with Thurstine Basset (2016) London and New York: Routledge.

The Political Self, Ed. Tweedy, R., (forthcoming Autumn 2016) London: Karnac, chapter contributor.

The Simpol Solution: Solving Global Problems Could Be Easier Than We Think, with John Bunzl, (2017) London: Peter Owen Publishers, and in 2018 in the US by Prometheus as The Simpol Solution: A new way to solve the world’s biggest problems, plus 3 foreign-language editions.