Mobbing in the Workplace - a danger for us?

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Thank you all for the responses posted to date on this thread - what painful yet illuminating reading on this normally side-lined topic.

I'm not ready yet to post replies to the responses, I want to think about this whole topic some more before doing so.

For any of us that have every experienced this, the memories can react some of the feelings that are encoded with the events of the past, and if you are a responder who is experiencing this so painfully that it is temporarily unmanageable, take great care of yourself (ie rest, go to bed, sleep if you can) and, when ready, talk with others who are safe and whom you know will understand. It may be an opportunity to start a healing process that was stalled in the past. There is such tremendous pain from this that people have suffered.

In the meantime, a link that sheds some light into the dark phenomenon and who the targets are:


http://www.researchgate.net/publication/228079779

Thank you Adamantium for the link you posted on the previous page. It's another good contribution to this discussion.

This passage gave me a lot of food for thought:

One person who has paid attention is Purdue psychologist Kipling Williams. In his book, Ostracism: The Power of Silence (The Guilford Press, 2001), Williams suggests that shunning and ostracism are particularly prevalent in the workplace when a worker has reported wrongdoing, because it is more difficult to prove retaliation when the aggressive act is a non-act. Yet the power of that non-action to wound a worker is profound, as Williams’ research has shown.

As Professor Tony Attwood and others (numerous others) have noted, persons with Aspergers are (for the vast majority) geared primarily to truth, not social convention of conformity. I would add to that: for some reason many are born with this innate moral compass, which does not spring from developmental learning. From whence does that come - it's a mystery. Later in the link, he states on a number of occasions that 99% of whistleblowers experience mobbing. That is a huge percentage for a social scientist to identify. It chills my blood to read it.

What then are the percentages of the mobbed who commit or attempt to commit suicide after mobbing? I haven't yet found nor looked for data on this. My own intuition - and experience - suggests to me that the true rate would be very high, relative to most other kinds of trauma (not all kinds - kidnap and torture would be worse).

The other thing that really bothers me this afternoon - it is about 4pm here - is why is this phenomenon left so much out of the professional and layperson's psychological, sociological, ergonomical, health and safety narratives and discourses. There are a few lonely voices like this professor whom I have quoted. But generally, there seems to be this commitment to silence - and I don't think for a moment that it is an accidental silence.
It is like the contrived silence around sexual abuse in the 1950s.

And another resource piece - this one has a particularly good section on the PHASES of mobbing in the workplace - it really gelled with my own experience, those things happened in that sequence - he is more or less describing what I endured too. And no doubt many who venture into this thread..


http://www.mobbingportal.com/LeymannV%26V1990(3).pdf

Thank you for that input (made another shiver run down my spine). I agree with you about the protections in New Zealand law - we have a plethora of statutes, commissions and guidelines now on all sorts of workplace mental violence, (for example workplace ageism and the lip service paid to equal pay for equal work but sustained discrimination against even professional women in that area). These protections though extensive are exactly as you say: largely ornamental. They provide employment for others, not protection to the mobbing targets. These commissions, institutions, government departments etc to a large extent exist to provide a service to themselves (this is basically true of any institution, there is always a self-serving element, even in charities. Only the size of their derived benefit varies across institutional settings and bodies).

Are you a New Zealand person? Did your experience take place here? If so, could you perhaps PM me and tell me which city? Auckland and Wellington are probably where mobbing is more frequent and claims more victims..

You know with hyenas, how there's always a lone male everyone picks on?

A person with an ASD is that lone individual in a group environment.

It's the story of my entire existence around groups of people.

Expect it.

Lehman appears to be the most advanced researcher on mobbing, its context, features and consequences.

I searched for suicide percentages of mobbed people and his was the only one I could find, on the Wikipedia "mobbing' page:

"In mobbing targets with PTSD, Leymann notes that the "mental effects were fully comparable with PTSD from war or prison camp experiences. Some patients may develop alcoholism or other substance abuse disorders. Family relationships routinely suffer. Some targets may even develop brief psychotic episodes, generally with paranoid symptoms. Leymann estimated that 15% of suicides in Sweden could be directly attributed to workplace mobbing.[5]"

15% is a shocking, alarming estimate. (It may be higher in New Zealand, as we seem to be one of the most efficient amongst the OECD countries in driving our citizens to suicide, as does the USA). I suspect both are more efficient at doing that than Sweden. So maybe the rate is even something like 20% of all suicides here.
The thing is: unlike other kinds of suicides, (gruesomely reported as due to mental illness, domestic violence, post-war trauma for example) the causes of mobbed-suicides are the ones that people never hear about, never read about, coroners don't report the true causes to the public, the police fail to investigate - you get the picture, I'm sure: the institutional level of denial is almost 100%.

I began this thread with the title: Mobbing in the Workplace - A Danger For Us?
Having read today all the research material I could find, my answer is an unequivocal YES. However I don't want people to panic over this. Some kinds of organisations have been identified as far more likely to mob than others - government departments for example - and forewarned, armed with knowledge, no longer naive, these are all part of a self-education process we can undergo. In circumstances like these - I LOVE the internet and the ways it can empower people.

To those of us here who survived mobbing, including the member who chose to message me privately rather than here - you are all brilliant survivors, I want to acknowledge your courage, resilience, souls and hearts. They wanted to destroy you. You survived them because you were a far better human being than they are, or were or ever could become. That's why they hated you in the first place.

I think of two sayings re the themes in this thread:
1) "Hell is other people" - Jean-Paul Sartre
2)
"If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you.…" Christ's teaching reported by John in the Gospel of John, 15:18 New Testament

B19

I suspect that these skewed patterns are more a function of our skewed social relations than some predisposition to be nasty or malevolent. In addition, there is the other issue of consciousness and where it is in the spectrum between subjective instinct driven behaviour and pure logic.

Admittedly this gives little comfort when dealing with these behaviours but alerts us to the fact that we are dealing with a particular state of being. These group behaviours are curious to say the least in a species that is supposedly self aware.