The
following information compiled and used with permission.
Special thanks to Tim Field - Bully
OnLine and to No
Bully For Me. What are
the health effects of mobbing?
The list of negative health effects
related to mobbing is long. Many of the the consequences
are related to the effect of prolonged exposure to
high levels of stress. Stress can be good for keeping
us alert and out of danger as it allows the body to
rev-up our heart rate and breathing to deal with physical
threats to life and limb.
However in our modern work world
we are more likely to face threats of a psychological
nature, something our fight or flight mechanism (stress
response) was not designed for. The stress response
can also be triggered by anticipation of non-life-threatening
events such as financial problems, job security, maritial
problems, etc. These stressors besiege not only mobbing
targets but their families and friends as well, compounding
and exacerbating an already debilitating situation.
The
cause of stress revealed
The truth about stress management,
stress relief, stress at work, stress on the job,
workplace stress, job stress etc.
Stress. It's on everyone's mind.
Or rather their body. But what causes stress? If you've
been sent on a stress management course, or its cheaper
alternative, a stress awareness course, the chances
are you'll have not learnt much about the causes of
stress. You may know how to clench your buttocks then
release as you breath out (hopefully not requiring
a change of underwear), but the only way of dealing
with stress is to identify the cause and then work
to reduce or eliminate the cause. Despite the need
for risk assessment and stress audits, many employers
are coy about the causes of stress. Encouraging employees
to endure prolonged negative stress - such as by forcing
them to attend a stress management seminar - could
be setting them up to sustain further injury to health
and stress-related illness.
It's often not recognised
that there are two types of stress: positive stress
results from a well-managed workplace and can be harnessed
to enhance performance, whilst negative stress - which
results in stress-related illnesses and causes injury
to health - results from a badly-managed workplace
in which inadequate employees bully to hide their
inadequacy. When people use the word "stress"
on its own, they usually mean "negative stress".
Stress is not the
employee's inability to cope with excessive workload
or the unwelcome attentions of bullying co-workers
and managers; stress is a consequence of the employer's
failure to provide a safe workplace.
Different people respond with different
degrees of stress to different stressors. However,
there are at least four factors which determine the
degree to which one will feel stressed:
- Control: a person
feels stressed to the extent to which they perceive
they are not in control of the stressor; at work,
employees have no control over their management
- Predictability:
a person feels stressed to the extent to which they
are unable to predict the behaviour or occurrence
of the stressor (bullies are notoriously unpredictable
in their behaviour)
- Expectation: a
person feels stressed to the extent to which they
perceive their circumstances are not improving and
will not improve (a bullying situation almost always
gets worse, especially as one gains insight into
the cause)
- Support: a person
feels stressed to the extent to which they lack
support systems, including work colleagues, management,
personnel, union, partner, family, friends, persons
in authority, official bodies, professionals, and
the law
Continued below...
Used with permission, courtesy
Carol
Simpson DesignWorks
Once the stress response is activated,
the body's energy is diverted to where it is needed,
thus heart rate, blood pressure and breathing rate
increase. All non-essential body functions are temporarily
shut down or operate at reduced level; these include
digestion, growth, sexual systems (menstrual cycle,
libido, testosterone production), immune system, storage
of energy as fat, etc. In response to threat, glucose,
proteins and fats are rapidly released from storage
(in muscles, fat cells and liver) and energy becomes
abundantly available to those muscles which will help
you fight the danger or run away from it. In extreme
cases bowels and bladder will spontaneously evacuate
to lighten the load; the smell may also help to deter
the attacker. There is no point in digestion, reproduction
and immune system etc continuing to operate if you're
likely to be the sabre-toothed tiger's dinner in the
next ten minutes - better divert that energy into
avoiding being on the menu.
Therefore, the prospect of going
to work, or the thought or sound of the bully approaching
immediately activates the stress response, but fighting
or flight are both inappropriate. In repeated bullying,
the stress response prepares the body to respond physically
when what is required is an employer-wide anti-bullying
policy, knowledge of bullying motivations and tactics,
assertive responses to defend ourselves against unwarranted
verbal and physical harassment, and effective laws
against bullying as an ultimate deterrent or arbiter
when all else fails.
TOP
Fatigue
The fatigue caused by bullying
is understandable when you realise that the body's
fight or flight mechanism ultimately becomes activated
for long periods, sometimes semi-permanently. For
a person with a regular daytime job, the activation
can last from Sunday evening - at the prospect of
having to go to work the following day - through to
the following Saturday morning - at the prospect of
two days relief.
The fight or flight mechanism is
designed to operate briefly and intermittently, but
when activated for abnormally long periods, causes
the body's physical, mental and emotional batteries
to drain dry. Energy stored in the body as protein,
glycogen and triglycerides is rapidly converted back
to amino acids, glucose and fatty acids etc to help
the body deal with the perceived threat. The process
of conversion, achieved via the release of stress
hormones such as glucocorticoids, glucagon, epinephrine
(adrenaline) and norepinephrine (noradrenaline), itself
consumes energy. The stress hormones also trigger
the conversion of protein in those muscles not required
for fight or flight into amino acids.
Whilst the human body is capable
of withstanding considerable levels and periods of
stress, when the stress response is turned on for
long periods, the body inevitably sustains damage
through prolonged raised levels of glucocorticoids
(which are toxic to brain cells), excessive depletion
of energy reserves, resulting in fatigue, loss of
strength and stamina, muscle wastage (as in steroid
myopathy when patients receive large doses of glucocorticoids
to treat various illnesses), and adult-onset diabetes.
At the weekend and days off, the
weakened immune system cannot fight off viruses (eg
colds, flu, glandular fever etc) and the person suffers
constant illnesses during which the batteries do not
recharge. Even without viral infection, the obsessiveness
and disturbed sleeping patterns prevent the body from
replenishing stored energy. Reactivation of the fight
or flight mechanism prior to returning to work produces
a flow of stress hormones which appear to temporarily
suppress the effects of illness.
Possible
Physical and Emotional symptoms of workplace mobbing
Workplace mobbbing can cause a
whole range of health problems, some manifesting themselves
as physical symptoms and others as psychological effects.
If you catch your situation early
enough you may well get through the situation without
any damage to your health; we would not want anyone
to believe that some of the severe health consequences
mentioned here are inevitable. Though, as Dr. Gary
Namie says, the personality type most likely to be
bullied are also those who are likely to 'stay longest
and get most damaged'.
What follows is by no means an
exhaustive list - just some of the most common symptoms.
Generally the worse you are being
bullied and the longer it continues, the more symptoms
you will have. The degree to which you experience
any or all of these effects also depends on the intensity
of the targeting, and your social support structure.
TOP
Physical
symptoms:
- Reduced immunity to infection leading to frequent
colds, coughs, flu, glandular fever, etc (especially
on days off, eg weekends and holidays)
- Chest pains and angina
- High blood pressure
- Heart attacks
- Strokes
- Headaches and migraines
- Loss of appetite (although a few people react
by overeating)
- Irritable bowel syndrome
- Reactive vomiting before, during or after meetings
(or at the site of a "triggering" incident,
person, place or thing or from just the thought
of going to certain locations ie workplace)
- Skin irritations and skin disorders (eg eczema,
psoriasis, shingles, internal and external ulcers,
urticaria)
- Hormonal problems (disturbed menstrual cycle,
dysmenorrhoea, loss of libido, impotence)
- Unusual clumsiness (such as an inability to grasp
small objects, separate sheets of paper or tendency
to drop cups,etc.)
- Sleep problems including nightmares and waking
early
- Disturbance of balance
- Panic attacks, feelings of nervousness and anxiety,
excessive sweating, trembling, palpitations
- Joint and muscle pains with no obvious cause
- Back pain
- Excessive need to bite or teeth grinding
- Tics
- Scratching
- Physical numbness, especially in fingers, toes
and lips
- Eye problems, such as new prescriptions needed
"virtually overnight"
- Dislike of loud noises and bright lights
- Development of new allergies
TOP
Emotional
symptoms:
- Bewilderment and confusion, an inability to understand
what is happening or why it happened
- A strong sense of denial, an inability to convince
yourself that the experience was real; your denial
is reinforced by the denial of those around you
and especially of people in authority
- Tearfulness
- Irritability, short-temperedness, sudden intense
anger and occasional violent outbursts
- Hyperawareness, an acute sense of time passing,
the seasons changing, distances when travelling
- An enhanced environmental awareness, a greater
respect for the natural world, a feeling of "wanting
to save the planet"
- Hypervigilance, which feels like but is not paranoia,
and which may be (sometimes deliberately) mislabelled
as paranoia by those around you
- Flashbacks and replays which you are unable to
switch off
- Impaired memory, forgetfulness, memory which is
intermittent, especially of day-to-day trivial things
- Difficulty in learning new information
- Inability to concentrate
- Exaggerated startle response
- Hypersensitivity - almost every action or remark
is perceived as critical or threatening, even when
you know it isn't
- A deep sense of betrayal
- Obsessiveness - the experience takes over your
life, you can't get it out of your mind
- Depression (reactive, not endogenous)
- Excessive shame, embarrassment and guilt
- Undue fear
- Low self-esteem and low self-confidence
- A deep sense of unworthiness, undeservingness
and non-entitlement
- Emotional numbness, anhedonia, an inability to
feel love or joy
- Sullenness (a sign the inner psyche has been damaged)
- Detachment, avoidance of anything that reminds
you of the experience
- Physical and mental paralysis at any reminder
of the experience
- Increased reliance on drugs (caffeine, nicotine,
alcohol, sleeping tablets, tranquillisers, antidepressants,
other substances) resulting in further compromised
health
- Comfort spending (and consequent financial problems)
- Thoughts of suicide and in some cases homicide
Increasingly researchers are suggesting
that diabetes, asthma, allergies, fibromyalgia, multiple
sclerosis (MS), chronic fatigue syndrome (ME), hydradentitis
supurativa (painful skin disorder) and even some forms
of cancer are caused or aggravated by stress.
TOP
Common
symptoms of PTSD
and Complex PTSD
that sufferers report experiencing
- Hypervigilance (feels like but is not paranoia)
- Exaggerated startle response
- Tearfulness
- Irritability
- Sudden angry or violent outbursts
- Flashbacks, nightmares, intrusive recollections,
replays, violent visualisations
- Triggers
- Sleep disturbance
- Exhaustion and chronic fatigue
- Reactive depression
- Guilt
- Feelings of detachment
- Avoidance behaviours
- Nervousness, anxiety
- Phobias about specific daily routines, events
or objects
- Irrational or impulsive behaviour
- Loss of interest
- Loss of ambition
- Anhedonia (inability to feel joy and pleasure)
- Poor concentration
- Impaired memory
- Joint pains, muscle pains
- Emotional numbness
- Physical numbness
- Low self-esteem
- Loss of libido
- An overwhelming sense of injustice and a strong
desire to do something about it
TOP
How
Serious are Psychological Problems after Mobbing?
© Heinz Leymann - file 32100e
- The
Mobbing Encyclopaedia
If we compare the difficulty of
diagnosing our patients with that of, for example,
individuals who have run-over and killed suicidal
persons on train (Malt, Leymann et al., 1993) or subway
tracks (Theorell, Leymann, Jodko, Konarski, &
Norbeck, 1994), we see pronounced differences. In
general, people seem to be able to intuitively imagine
how it must feel to try to brake a train that weighs
hundreds of tons and how it feels, despite these desperate
efforts, to finally run over the person who has laid
on the tracks in order to die. Nevertheless, the driver´s
PTSD reaction is - statistically speaking - very much
milder than that of our patients. Also, a considerably
smaller proportion of train engineers suffer a PTSD
reaction or share severe PTSD diagnose. Indeed the
number is very small in comparison with that which
prevails for patients such as ours, who almost all
were diagnosed as having severe PTSD. This comparison
might illustrate what the latter group of patients
must have gone through in terms of psychological pain,
anxiety, degradation, helplessness - that led to such
extensive PTSD injuries. The reactions of our patients
can, on the other hand, , be compared with those accounted
for in a Norwegian study concerning raped women (Dahl,
1989).
Mobbing
and expulsion from the labor market
are in themselves victimizations of
trauma-inducing strength.
By
way of comparison with the high incidence of PTSD,
it may be of interest to mention what the investigation
of Swedish and Norwegian train engineers revealed,
after the engineers had run over and killed suicidal
individuals on the tracks: The frequency of high "intrusion"
and "avoidance" values were considerably
lower than in the present study (Malt, Karlehagen,
Leymann, 1993). Even a study which mapped psychological
problems in subway drivers in Stockholm shows a considerably
lower frequency of drivers who developed psychological
problems after having run over suicidal individuals
on the tracks (Theorell and Leymann, 1994). The above-mentioned
study of raped women shows very high values on the
two IES scales (see also Dahl, 1989). We recommend
as a hypothesis that high IES values are present if
the traumatic event is followed by a series of further
violations of the subjects´ rights and insults
to their identities from different societal sources
(Leymann, 1989). This did not occur in the groups
of engineers but it did occur in cases of raped women
- and, of course, in the mobbed employees in question
in my studies. Mobbing and expulsion from the labor
market are in themselves victimizations of
trauma-inducing strength.
Our present hypothesis is that
PTSD develops more severely if the traumatic situations
last a long time and are followed by rights
violations such as those conflicted by the judicial
system or within the health care community, continue
over a long period. Leymann (1989) carried out a major
review of the literature concerning catastrophe psychiatry
and victimology based on about 25,000 pages of scientific
text. The objective was to make an inventory of the
disappointments, insults and renewed traumas that
follow an initial "causal trauma" - a trauma
which thereafter leads to what is called "traumatizing
consequential events", due to society's structure
and the way it functions. Many of these traumata are
provoked by the way administrative instances deal
with or abstain from dealing with the situation.
The mobbed employee who has become
our patient suffers from a traumatic environment:
psychiatric, social insurance office, personnel department,
managers, co-workers, labor unions, doctors in general
practice, company health care, etc., can, if events
progress unfavorably, produce worse and worse traumata.
Thus, our patients, like raped
women, find themselves under a continuing threat.
As long as the perpetrator is free, the woman can
be attacked again. As long as the mobbed individual
does not receive effective support, he or she can
be torn to pieces again at any time.
Torn
out of their social network, the majority of
mobbing victims face the threat of early retirement,
with permanent psychological damage.
Thus,
these individuals find themselves in a prolonged stress
- and in a prolonged trauma-creating situation. Instead
of a short, acute (and normal!) PTSD reaction that
can subside after several days or weeks, theirs is
constantly renewed: new traumata and new sources of
anxiety arise in a constant stream during which time
the individual experiences rights violations that
further undermine his or her self-confidence and psychological
health. The unwieldy social situation for these individuals
consists not only of severe psychological trauma but
of an extremely prolonged stress condition that seriously
threatens the individual's socio-economic existence.
Torn out of their social network, the majority of
mobbing victims face the threat of early retirement,
with permanent psychological damage.
TOP
Differences
between mental illness and psychiatric injury
The person who is being bullied
will eventually say something like "I think I'm
being paranoid..."; however they are correctly
identifying hypervigilance, a symptom of PTSD, but
using the popular but misunderstood word paranoia.
The differences between hypervigilance and paranoia
make a good starting point for identifying the differences
between mental illness and psychiatric injury.
| Paranoia |
Hypervigilance |
| paranoia is a form of mental illness;
the cause is thought to be internal, eg a minor
variation in the balance of brain chemistry |
is a response to an external event
(violence, accident, disaster, violation, intrusion,
bullying, etc) and therefore an injury |
| paranoia tends to endure and to
not get better of its own accord |
wears off (gets better), albeit
slowly, when the person is out of and away from
the situation which was the cause |
| the paranoiac will not admit to
feeling paranoid, as they cannot see their paranoia |
the hypervigilant person is acutely
aware of their hypervigilance, and will easily
articulate their fear, albeit using the incorrect
but popularised word "paranoia" |
| sometimes responds to drug treatment |
drugs are not viewed favourably
by hypervigilant people, except in extreme circumstances,
and then only briefly; often drugs have no effect,
or can make things worse, sometimes interfering
with the body's own healing process |
| the paranoiac often has delusions
of grandeur; the delusional aspects of paranoia
feature in other forms of mental illness, such
as schizophrenia |
the hypervigilant person often has
a diminished sense of self-worth, sometimes dramatically
so |
| the paranoiac is convinced of their
self-importance |
the hypervigilant person is often
convinced of their worthlessness and will often
deny their value to others |
| paranoia is often seen in conjunction
with other symptoms of mental illness, but not
in conjunction with symptoms of PTSD |
hypervigilance is seen in conjunction
with other symptoms of PTSD, but not in conjunction
with symptoms of mental illness |
| the paranoiac is convinced of their
plausibility |
the hypervigilant person is aware
of how implausible their experience sounds and
often doesn't want to believe it themselves (disbelief
and denial) |
| the paranoiac feels persecuted by
a person or persons unknown (eg "they're
out to get me") |
the hypervigilant person is hypersensitized
but is often aware of the inappropriateness of
their heightened sensitivity, and can identify
the person responsible for their psychiatric injury |
| sense of persecution |
heightened sense of vulnerability
to victimisation |
| the sense of persecution felt by
the paranoiac is a delusion, for usually no-one
is out to get them |
the hypervigilant person's sense
of threat is well-founded, for the serial bully
is out to get rid of them and has often coerced
others into assisting, eg through mobbing; the
hypervigilant person often cannot (and refuses
to) see that the serial bully is doing everything
possible to get rid of them |
| the paranoiac is on constant alert
because they know someone is out to get them |
the hypervigilant person is on alert
in case there is danger |
| the paranoiac is certain
of their belief and their behaviour and expects
others to share that certainty |
the hypervigilant person cannot
bring themselves to believe that the bully cannot
and will not see the effect their behaviour is
having; they cling naively to the mistaken belief
that the bully will recognise their wrongdoing
and apologise |
TOP
Other differences
between mental illness and psychiatric injury:
| Mental illness |
Psychiatric injury |
| the cause often cannot be identified |
the cause is easily identifiable
and verifiable, but denied by those who are accountable |
| the person may be incoherent or
what they say doesn't make sense |
the person is often articulate but
prevented from articulation by being traumatised |
| the person may appear to be obsessed |
the person is obsessive, especially
in relation to identifying the cause of their
injury and both dealing with the cause and effecting
their recovery |
| the person is oblivious to their
behaviour and the effect it has on others |
the person is in a state of acute
self-awareness and aware of their state, but often
unable to explain it |
| the depression is a clinical or
endogenous depression |
the depression is reactive; the
chemistry is different to endogenous depression |
| there may be a history of depression
in the family |
there is very often no history of
depression in the individual or their family |
| the person has usually exhibited
mental health problems before |
often there is no history of mental
health problems |
| may respond inappropriately to the
needs and concerns of others |
responds empathically to the needs
and concerns of others, despite their own injury |
| displays a certitude about themselves,
their circumstances and their actions |
is often highly sceptical about
their condition and circumstances and is in a
state of disbelief and bewilderment which they
will easily and often articulate ("I can't
believe this is happening to me" and "Why
me?" - click
here for the answer) |
| may suffer a persecution complex |
may experience an unusually heightened
sense of vulnerability to possible victimisation
(ie hypervigilance) |
| suicidal thoughts are the result
of despair, dejection and hopelessness |
suicidal thoughts are often a logical
and carefully thought-out solution or conclusion |
| exhibits despair |
is driven by the anger of injustice |
| often doesn't look forward to each
new day |
looks forward to each new day as
an opportunity to fight for justice |
| is often ready to give in or admit
defeat |
refuses to be beaten, refuses to
give up |
|
![[mobbing.ca]](assets/mobbingca.gif)
Photo
- 
