In 2017, Professor Burstow donated $50,000 to the University of Toronto to establish an anti-psychiatry scholarship there — a move that rankled some on the faculty.

“They’re trying to claim that there’s no such thing as psychiatric illness, and I think she did a lot of damage with the publicity she got surrounding that,” Edward Shorter, a professor of psychiatry at the university and a longstanding critic of anti-psychiatry, said in a phone interview. The university, he said, “made a big mistake in setting up a special scholarship fund in her name; it’s an anti-psychiatry fund that legitimizes the movement.”

Professor Burstow was not a psychologist; she studied philosophy and English as an undergraduate at the University of Manitoba, received a master’s in English from the University of Toronto, and then went to England to begin a doctorate in English.

But she returned to Canada before finishing her doctorate and resumed her studies at the University of Toronto, where she received a master’s in education. She began practicing as a psychotherapist in 1978 as she pursued a doctorate in educational theory with a psychology minor.

As she worked with patients while completing her doctorate, she noticed a pattern that would push her into the anti-psychiatry movement.

“A lot of what was causing women these problems was patriarchy,” Professor Burstow said in the oral history. “A lot of things that were seen as problematic were reasonable ways for women to cope in a patriarchal, traumatizing world.”

By 1979 she was referring to herself as a “feminist therapist” and publishing research that emphasized the importance of talk therapy. In 1992 she published “Radical Feminist Therapy,” a book that discusses, among other things, violence against women and their responses to it, including depression and eating disorders.