Victimhood gangstalking is a relatively new phenomenon, which could be dated back safely to the rise of social justice movements such as Me Too.
In victimhood gangstalking, people who self-identify as victims, people whose victimhood constitutes their entire identity. These people group together, collude and collaborate against someone who is ostensibly the perpetrator, the evil one.
It's a morality play of all good angelic people versus all bad, evil doers.
Victimhood gangstalking is a private case of a much larger phenomenon known as gangstalking, and it is the topic of today's video presentation to you, my dear colleagues.
So, Honourable Colleagues, I am honored to serve as the keynote speaker in the sixth global conference on addiction medicine, behavioral health and psychiatry.
Allow me to present myself. I'm a professor of clinical psychology in CIAPS, Commonwealth Institute for Advanced Professional Studies, in Cambridge and Birmingham, United Kingdom, Ontario, Canada and Lagos, Nigeria. I'm also a visiting professor of psychology in Southeast European University, and formerly a visiting professor for five years in Southern Federal university in rostov-on-don Russia.
Now that we have this out of the way let us discuss the topic of today's video presentation.
I want to deal with a much mischaracterized and neglected psychosocial phenomenon known as gangstalking.
Gangstalking is described in the literature overwhelmingly as a kind of delusional disorder.
It is sometimes conflated, as I said, with social justice activism, with victimhood and woke movements such as Me Too, when gangs of activists and alleged victims, alleged self-imputed victims, target individuals cast as evil perpetrators.
Alternatively gang stalking has been attributed to deep state structures and featured in other equally inane conspiracy theories such as QAnon.
And this expansive redefinition of gangstalking has given it a bad name, a bad rep.
This reputation caused academics to shy away from it, to not study it.
And so people who claim to be gangstocked are automatically cast as delusional, paranoid, psychotic, grandiose or narcissistic, and worse.
There has been no in-depth study of the veracity of these claims, the claims of the victims of gangstalking, because its very existence has been widely and invariably discredited and poohed.
However, these are the facts. Occasionally, gang-stalking is real. It does occur.
I will describe in this video presentation 10 environments, 10 settings, 10 sets of circumstances that give rise to the orchestrated activity colloquially known as gang stalking.
10 types of gangstalking.
Discrediting all gangstalking claims as delusional or paranoid is wrong.
Indeed, in most cases, people who claim that they are being gang-stalked are or suffer from mental health issues but on some occasions it is still a real phenomenon denied by a clueless and I would even say arrogant academic establishment. Targeted individuals do exist and I'm one of them.
The dynamics of gangstalking when it does occur, this collusion and collaboration between multiple individuals around the shared target, this resembles what we call shared psychosis.
There is an inducer, someone who generates the dynamic, and then there are people who joined the dynamic on the fly. And these are known as secondary induced participants.
So it is a form of shared psychosis involving in some cases a fantasy.
The participants in gang stalking usually cast themselves in terms of good versus evil.
It's a morality play. They deploy a splitting defense.
The participants in the gang, the members of the mob, the extensions of the group, these people describe themselves as all good, while the victim, the target of the gang stalking, is described as all bad, is demonized.
That is a classical, infantile, primitive defense mechanism known as splitting.
At the same time, the group empowers its members, and there is a sense of grandiosity narcissistic elation.
The empowerment is the outcome of the ability to inflict distress and pain and hurt on the victim or the target of the group.
This ability translates into a power dynamic and the whole thing devolves into a power play.
And this capacity to exercise power enhances the sense of omnipotence.
There are also grandiose reactions and narcissistic elation which have to do with the arcane language of the group, the secret knowledge within the group, including the knowledge of anticipated actions that the group is initiating internally and that are to be inflicted on the victim of the target by surprise.
Taking the victim by surprise is a very empowering experience. It's intoxicating. There is a power inebriation within the group.
I will describe now 10 situations where gangstalking is actually very common.
People with narcissistic personality disorder and to some extent people with borderline personality disorder and anti-social personality disorder tend to use emissaries. They are known colloquially as flying monkeys. They tend to recruit and convert people to the cause and then they send out these people as cannon fodder or kind of soldiers.
And the flying monkey's role is to communicate with the target and the victim and to cause the target or the victim distress and to obtain favorable outcomes by initiating this kind of contact or communication.
Many flying monkeys are unwitting collaborators, but some of them are fully aware of what they're doing.
They are, for example, self-aggrandizing covert narcissists who seek narcissistic supply by creating alliances and coalitions with the group.
They could be psychopaths who are out to secure some goal. They could be simply people who enjoy drama and they are thrill seekers or risk takers a bit, again a bit psychopathic.
There are many free riders within a typical situation of gang stalking. These are people who are more or less lurking or observing the action as a form of entertainment.
So flying monkeys and unwitting collaborators create conspiracies, but not in the conspiracy theory sense.
Conspiracies, when I say conspiracies, I mean structural goal-oriented alignments.
And so they create conspiracies and these conspiracies are rigid. They have the goal of diminishing, hurting, disabling, attacking, distressing the target or the victim.
This is one form of gangstocking.
Another form of gangstalking is loose networking, like-minded coalitions or alliances of like-minded people who regard the target or the victim is a legitimate vector of attack. They think the target and the victim deserve what they have coming.
So flying monkeys, collaborators, allies, free riders, they all joined the group. They all form a part of the crowd, a part of the mob.
And this coalition attacks a highly identifiable target, indeed a targeted individual usually.
Of course, gangstalking can have as its target a cooperation or even an idea or a belief, or an ideology, or a political party, or a political candidate. Anyone could become, and anything could become the target or the victim of gangstocking.
To claim that gangstocking does not exist is absolutely counterfactual, especially in the case of narcissists.
Narcissists engage flying monkeys, their long arm, army. They engage them in smear campaigns in gang-stalking campaigns in targeting victims and others.
Smear campaigns are a variant, a private case of gangstocking. They involve the spread of falsehoods, defamation and libelous claims, all of them wrong and all of them lies, the spread of these misinformation and disinformation among the social group and the social network of the targeted individual, so as to inflict reputational damage on the individual and disable the individual professionally and also individually, psychologically.
Smear campaigns create havoc and severe damage even to physical health but definitely to the target's ability to function to the target's ability to obtain outcomes, interact and interface with other people, create alliances and collaborate with other people.
In some cases, smear campaigns cost the victim dearlymarriage, his family, his prospects, his future.
Smear campaigns are a blunt instrument in this sense. They are highly destructive.
And so they are founded, smear campaigns are founded on groups of people working together. They lend each other credibility.
The very fact that several or multiple people are involved spreading the same claim, the same falsehood, the same lie lends the lie or the statements credibility. It's like if so many people are saying the same thing, it must be true. There is no smoke without fire and so on.
So gangstalking in this setting is about establishing the credibility of the false claims that are used to attack the victim or the target.
We come across gangstalking in a formalized structured way in cults. Cults define an in-group versus an out-group. The out-group are the enemy. The out-group are out to get the members of the in-group.
And so cults are highly defensive. And cults engage in othering, othering in the bad sense, othering of potential enemies. Cults are very hypervigilant and very often paranoid.
So the cohesion of the cult depends crucially on the existence and the targeting of an external enemy. And because all the cult members participate in this activity, cults by definition are just another name for gang stalking.
Next are the mentally ill. Mentally ill, especially people with personality disorders and to some extent psychotic disorders tend to join forces, to gang up, because mentally ill people mutually reinforce their delusions and paranoia.
The members of gangs who are founded by mentally ill people are usually mentally ill as well and they lend each other credibility, they affirm each other's delusions and fantasies and paranoid ideation. So the very membership in the group lends the mentally ill people the delusion or the illusion that is his or her mental illness is not affecting their ability to perceive reality.
Mentally ill people in gangs or in groups generate a group reality testing. It's as if the members of the group by virtue of colluding, by virtue of coalescing around a single target and around a single ID, for example, revenge or justice or morality, by centering themselves around this core identity of the group, they generate an emergent type of reality testing.
But this reality testing is based on misattribution and fantasy. It is the reality of the members of the mentally ill group, not the reality of healthy or normal people.
And yet, it is very compelling. It is very convincing. It's a narrative that easily captures outsiders such as documentary filmmakers or lawyers or even law enforcement.
Mentally ill people usually work when they attack a target or a victim usually do work in groups. And to deny this is to deny reality. They tend to flock and herd themselves into highly specific forums.
When you go online, you can find literally forums and groups, including so-called euphemistically support groups, where mentally people congregate, choose a victim or a target, and then demonize that person. And then it's a short step from demonizing the person to taking action, attacking the person, seeking to damage the person's reputation, canceling the person, lying about the person, and so on.
One form of gangstalking involves vindictiveness, revenge, holding grudges.
When there is an individual who has had tumultuous or problematic relationships with multiple others, these other people have the incentive to come together in order to seek revenge.
And so we do have revenge gangs or revenge mobs or vindictive crowds online and offline. And they seek to target an individual that they perceive has wronged all of them in the past.
So these people have a common denominator. They all claim to have been damaged or afflicted by the same individual, and then they seek revenge.
The problem is that vindictiveness falsifies reality. So the reality testing is impaired on the one hand and on the other hand, vindictiveness gives rises and is highly correlated with antisocial and even criminal behaviors, such as harassment, such as stalking, such as hacking or cracking computers, and of course such as lying to the police and other authorities.
Vindictive groups will stop at nothing until they have punished the target of the victim and their punishment is total. So they seek the victim's death or the victim's incarceration for life. they would stop and they would stop at nothing.
There are no moral constraints or behavioral inhibitions among members of vindictive groups.
And of course, as you can see, this is a form of gang stalking.
Next is the mobs, the tyranny of ideology, the dictatorship of ideas and values and beliefs.
We see it often, for example, in religious settings.
So mobs, crowds, cancel culture is an example of gang stalking. It is when thousands and sometimes millions of individuals collude and collaborate with the aim of deleting the online presence of a specific celebrity or public intellectual.
Cancel culture is gang stalking. It is not a conspiracy but it is a loose network type of gang stalking.
You remember that I proposed that there are two types of gang stalking. The structural conspiracy type and the loose network type.
So this is an example of a loose network type. It's a mob. It's not a cult. It's a hive mind. It's not a rigid, secret society, so to speak.
So these mobs coalesce on the fly, they join together, they attack a specific individual or target and when mission is accomplished they disintegrate. This is a form of ad hoc gang stalking.
Bullying, including a school, usually involve multiple individuals and a single target.
Any observation of school bullying would immediately reveal a structure which is highly reminiscent of gang stalking. These are gangs. Bullies work very often in gangs and they attack highly identifiable, targeted individuals.
But bullying can take place in multiple situations and settings, for example, in the workplace.
And so whenever bullying takes place, the bully compromises others. The bully co-ops other people. The bully forms ad hoc networks around the act of bullying.
People join the bully because they equally hate the targeted individual. Or people join the bully because they don't want to be bullied. And as allies of the bully, they purchase immunity. They're safe. People join the bully because they enjoy the fun and entertainment. They're a bit sadistic. People join the bully because the bully guarantees long-term favorable outcomes by getting rid or some obstacle or some problem.
People join bullies for a variety of reasons.
But it is extremely rare for a bully to act alone.
Bullies fit into a corporate culture. They are usually encouraged implicitly. They're egged on in some way. Someone is turning a blind eye.
Bullying is a form of conspiracy or collusion and because it involves invariably multiple individuals, then bullying is a prime example of gang stalking.
But we can find gang stalking that is highly institutionalized, socially acceptable and even commendable.
For example, religious excommunication.
When you run a foul of some religious edicts within your parish, within your religious community, or church, or synagogue, or mosque, or whatever it is, you are excommunicated.
Some excommunication is ritualized and formal. Some excommunication is unspoken. It's a kind of silent treatment.
But excommunication is like a virus, it spreads across the entire community. There's no excommunication without a community, a community to be excluded from.
So religious excommunication is an exercise at gang stalking. The religious group acts as a gang, as a mob, as a cult.
And when it excludes one of its members, because of blasphemy, because of adultery, because of, I don't know what, whatever the reason may be, when it excludes one of the members, it is gang stalking.
Similarly, social ostracism. I mentioned cancel culture, but there are many forms of social ostracism.
Until the 1950s, for example, people avoided and shunned divorced women. Divorced women were considered outcasts, pariahs, no one would talk to them, no one would communicate with them, no one would transact with them.
And to date, a divorced woman was a serious problem, a serious diminution in one's reputation. It had a reputational cost.
So this is an example of social ostracism, but social ostracism must involve more than one individual. It must involve society itself, highly specific neighborhoods and communities.
And so social ostracism, by its definition, ex-definitio, is gang stalking.
And finally, of course, there is legal and institutional gang stalking.
I'm not a fan of President-elect Donald Trump, and that is the understatement of the century.
But what has been done to him within the legal system is extremely reminiscent of gang stalking.
Groups of people identified with a specific political party leveraged the justice system to persecute and prosecute a single targeted individual.
In this case, Donald Trump.
Many of the accusations were very weak and concocted. Some accusations stuck.
That's not the point. The point is the sudden orchestration of dozens of lawsuits and criminal processes. This suddenness, this abruptness is highly indicative of coordination. Someone must have coordinated the legal campaign against Donald Trump.
Should this be the case, we are talking about gang stalking. Legal, institutional, but still gang stalking.
There is a gang, there's a group, there's a crowd, there's a mob, and they put their minds together on how to eliminate an individual, a targeted individual.
For the academic world of psychology to deny the existence of gang stalking diminishes the credibility of our profession.
Because if we insist that gang stalking is invariably delusional, we fly in the face of the experiences of thousands of people who are mentally healthy and not delusional at all and not paranoid at all.
Gang stalking does exist in multiple settings, on multiple occasions with multiple people.
And again, we should study this phenomenon, and we should afford the victims and the targeted individuals with instruments, including psychological instruments, to cope with this onslaught, to survive and afterwards to heal and to thrive.
Thank you for listening and I wish you a very good, productive and enlightening conference.