Post Mobbing Effects

Excerpt: How Serious are Psychological Problems after Mobbing?

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).

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.
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.

How Serious are Psychological Problems after Mobbing? © Heinz Leymann - file 32100e

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Cashew Commentary: I am telling you that this is a very good description of what happens to people you label as inherently defective. It goes with this dehumanising process. The problems the patient ends up with may well be much larger than the ones that got him or her into the system in the first place. Many people who are on the receiving end of this get labelled 'schizophrenic' or 'bi-polar' or 'delusional' because the recounting of what ACTUALLY happens to us is heard as SYMPTOMS 'proving' it was all in our minds. That is because psychiatry sees the experience of the identified patient as the CAUSE when in fact, it is the EFFECT.