Why do people gangstalk

One is that gangstalking is a widespread, insidious, and centrally coordinated system of persecution employing community members, figures of authority, and state actors. This was the dominant discourse in the study corpus. The opposing view is a medicalized discourse supporting gangstalking as a form of mental disorder. Contributors used linguistic practices such as presupposition, nominalization, and the use of specialized jargon to construct gangstalking as real and external to the individual affected.

Those affected demonstrated a concern with accumulating evidence to prove their position to incredulous others. Conclusions: The study found that contributors to the study corpus accomplished a number of tasks. They used linguistic practices to co-construct an internally coherent and systematized persecutory belief system. They advanced a position that gangstalking is real and contested the medicalizing discourse that gangstalking is a form of mental disorder.

They supported one another by sharing similar experiences and providing encouragement and advice. Finally, they commiserated over the challenges of proving the existence of gangstalking. Gangstalking is a novel persecutory belief system whereby those affected believe they are being followed, stalked, and harassed by a large number of people, often numbering in the thousands [ 1 , 2 ].

In contrast to traditional forms of stalking that are usually organized by a single person [ 3 ], those affected by gangstalking are unable to identify a single person responsible for their persecution and experience it as a widely distributed and coordinated effort of co-conspirators.

People who identify as affected by gangstalking self-identify as targeted individuals. Although specific experiences of gangstalking vary between those affected, the various expressions of this polythetic belief system include a number of common elements. In particular, the campaign of harassment that affected individuals perceive is frequently experienced as an accretion of innumerable individually benign acts such as people clearing their throat, muttering under their breath, or giving dirty looks as they pass on the street.

Perceived as deliberate, connected, and malicious, intense distress is experienced as a cumulative effect of these acts over a prolonged period. Individuals affected by gangstalking are frequently unable to pinpoint a clear motive for the harassment, which is a further source of perplexity and distress. They frequently describe that the apparent goal is to make them appear mentally ill, to cause them to be discredited and disbelieved, and sometimes to encourage or precipitate their eventual suicide.

Interest in gangstalking is increasing over time and the popular press reports the activities of those affected with growing frequency [ 4 - 7 ]. As shown in Figure 1 , the popularity of the Google search term gangstalking has increased steadily over the past decade [ 8 ]. When targeted individuals present to clinical attention, they are frequently diagnosed with psychotic illnesses and the gangstalking is conceptualized as a persecutory delusional system by psychiatric professionals.

The gangstalking belief system is similar to some other well-established persecutory delusional belief systems, such as the Truman Show delusion [ 9 ], where those affected believe that their lives are surreptitiously being continuously recorded and produced into a reality television show and that everyone or nearly everyone they come into contact with is complicit in the deceit.

As with many stigmatized beliefs [ 10 , 11 ], individuals affected by gangstalking reject the psychiatric formulation of their condition and turn elsewhere for support. These fora are a nonclinical environment where those affected may express their beliefs more openly and transparently without the fear of being disbelieved or labeled as may be the case in clinical settings. The internet has become an important source of health information [ 12 ].

In addition to providing a platform for those affected to find support, online fora may also serve as a crucible where people flesh out, develop, and linguistically and rhetorically construct the gangstalking phenomenon. It may also serve as a medium of transmission of the ideas as with other belief systems [ 13 ].

This study aims to describe how users of an internet forum about gangstalking construct, support, and contest the gangstalking belief system. It also seeks to describe how they use language to navigate social relationships within the context of the forum and as part of these processes. Delusions are defined as fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence [ 14 ].

However, attempts to precisely define delusions have proven problematic and debate and controversy persist [ 16 ], with some authors suggesting that pinning down delusions definitively may be an impossible task [ 17 ]. For example, superstitious beliefs resemble delusions and are widely held among people who are not affected by mental illness [ 18 ].

Other belief systems such as astrology, tarot, and parapsychology also resemble delusional belief systems, yet people endorsing these belief systems are not usually classified as experiencing delusions.

Although there are widely accepted hypotheses regarding a biological underpinning of delusions, to date there is insufficient evidence to support a clear mechanistic explanation of them [ 19 ].

Moreover, the content of delusions varies across place and time and appears to be heavily influenced by prevalent cultural trends and symbols [ 20 ]. For these reasons, we regard persecutory belief systems and their variants such as conspiracy theories, overvalued ideas, and idiosyncratic belief systems as being socially constructed [ 21 , 22 ]. One of the key tenets of social constructionism is that knowledge is sustained by social processes [ 23 ].

This view holds that it is through discourse that certain, dominant ways of viewing and understanding particular phenomena come to be regarded as truth , at the expense of other perspectives [ 24 ]. It is on this basis ie, through discourse that certain psychological or embodied experiences come to be understood and treated within a society as being either normal or pathological and, by extension, those who experience that phenomenon as either healthy , ill , or even deviant.

In this paper, we adopt a social constructionist approach to understanding the roles that language, discourse, and other social processes play in constructing the gangstalking phenomenon.

The methodology adopted in this study can be described as corpus-based discourse analysis. Corpus linguistics is largely a methodology but also a field of research which involves using computational techniques to examine recurring linguistic patterns in large, digitized bodies of authentic language data. The approach to corpus-based discourse analysis employed in this study is derived from that described at length by Hunt and Brookes [ 25 ] in a previous analysis of mental health—related discourse in online fora.

This approach relies on a combination of 3 techniques from corpus linguistics: keyword analysis, collocation analysis, and manual examination of concordances. The first 2 techniques are quantitative methods that use statistical techniques to sift through a large body of text known as a corpus to identify, respectively, words and word combinations that are notable due to their high frequency or statistical salience [ 26 ].

The third technique, concordancing, is essentially a way of viewing the corpus data that allows users to inspect all instances of a given word, word string, or collocational pairing in the corpus—in context—and, if it is desired, to access the original corpus texts in their entirety. Concordancing facilitates more qualitative analysis of the patterns in a corpus.

In this study, it is used to follow up the identification of keywords and collocational pairing, with the ensuing qualitative analysis trained on identifying the wider discursive and rhetorical practices that the keywords and collocates signal and through which the forum users construe their relationships, identity, and experiences. To obtain source texts for our corpus of forum interactions about gangstalking, we used Google to identify support groups for people experiencing gangstalking.

We then focused on the largest gangstalking forum on the internet in terms of number of users, threads, and posts.

The forum used to construct the study corpus is organized into topics, each one of which has an accompanying discussion which forms a thread. We used Python 3. The data collected included all threads posted between July 17, , and September 2, the date of collection. Some threads that were posted and subsequently deleted by their authors were not available for analysis. This was the case for 80 of the threads we sought to extract, which left threads for analysis.

All of the data used in our analysis were posted on a public forum, available to any internet user without having to subscribe or log into the forum.

The forum permits users to contribute anonymously with a pseudonymous username that is not linked to their offline identities. Our examination of the forum posts constitutes what Eysenbach and Till [ 27 ] refer to as passive analysis. The institutional research ethics board at The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health reviewed the proposed study design and opined that it did not require formal approval. At the time of data collection, the gangstalking forum that we sampled had a total of approximately 14, exactly 13, members.

Our analysis began by using version 8 of the corpus analytical software WordSmith Tools [ 28 ] to identify keywords in the study corpus. Keywords are words that occur in the study corpus with a statistically marked frequency when compared with a reference corpus, which usually represents a norm or benchmark for the type of language under study [ 29 ].

As our reference corpus, we elected to use the spoken component of the updated British National Corpus [ 30 ]—an million-word corpus of conversational British English sampled between and This reference corpus was also used by Hunt and Brookes [ 25 ], who demonstrated its utility for identifying keywords which signal discursive and rhetorical practices in the context of online fora.

Keyness was measured using a combination of the log-likelihood and the log ratio statistic [ 31 ]. Log-likelihood is a confidence measure. The higher the log-likelihood value assigned to a keyword, the smaller the probability that the statistically marked observed frequency of that word has arisen due to chance or a sampling error, for example.

Log ratio, by contrast, is an effect size measure. The higher the log ratio score assigned to a particular keyword, the larger the observed difference is between its frequencies in the analysis corpus and the reference corpus. We stipulated that keywords should have a log-likelihood score of We also specified that a word had to be present in at least 2.

We then ranked the resulting keywords using the log ratio statistic [ 32 ]. We set a minimum log ratio of 1. A log ratio of 1. After identifying keywords, we grouped them into thematic and semantic categories. Following keyword categorization, we extracted collocates of a select number of keywords of interest, in order to examine the wider linguistic contexts within which those words tended to occur in the forum posts. We defined collocates as words occurring within 5 words to the left or right of the search word this is the default in WordSmith Tools and had been found to be productive for corpus-based discourse studies, eg, by Hunt and Brookes [ 25 ]; Tables 2 and 3.

Collocation was measured and ranked using the cubed version of the mutual information MI statistic MI 3. The MI 3 statistic highlights collocational pairings whose frequency is marked ie, higher than would be expected given the frequencies of the constituent words and the size of the corpus overall. It is useful for corpus-based discourse analysis, as it favors high-frequency collocational pairings which are thereby particularly well established in the discourse [ 34 ].

For analyses of computer-mediated communication, this offers the practical advantage that it does not place undue emphasis on infrequent collocates that are typos or spelling errors.

Finally, keywords and collocational pairings of interest were subjected to manual discourse analysis using concordance output and, where beneficial, based on entire forum posts and those which precede and follow them in the threads.

As noted, the objective of this stage of the analysis was to identify the discursive and rhetorical practices through which the forum contributors construed the gangstalking phenomenon and their experiences of it. As described in the previous section, we began our analysis by obtaining keywords from our corpus of gangstalking forum threads. We modified Sheridan and James [ 1 ] initial 24 thematic categories of the gangstalking experience to 9 aggregate keyword categories Table 4 : 1 conceptions of gangstalking, 2 social and interpersonal concepts, 3 conceptualizations of the individual, 4 mental and psychological processes, 5 epistemic indicators, 6 extent of conspiracy, 7 technological affordances employed in gangstalking, 8 words pertaining to the internet, and finally, 9 grammatical words were categorized together.

Some words were assigned to multiple categories. For example, the polysemous word state can refer to a state of mind. It can also refer to a nation or political community. For this reason, it was placed in 2 categories. The keywords belonging to the category Conceptions of gangstalking illustrate that those affected employ various lexical choices for constructing gangstalking in their forum posts. Comparing raw frequencies, it is most commonly referred to as gangstalking , which occurs times in the corpus, and stalking , which occurs times.

Gangstalking is the gerund form of gangstalk , a portmanteau of gang and stalk. The word is a neologism. It is not included in standard English language dictionaries and indeed is absent from the updated Spoken British National Corpus, which served as our reference corpus for the keyword analysis above.

The term gangstalking served several different functions in our corpus. In some instances, it serves as a progressive verb. In other instances it is used as a gerund or as a present participle and functions as an adjective. For example:. While the first of these examples demonstrates that gangstalking is conceived of as a process similar to harassment and, in this case, perpetrated by a famous musician , examples 2 and 3 demonstrate the way in which the existence of gangstalking is frequently represented as presupposed and uncontroversial.

That is, the use of gangstalking as a descriptor of people or games functions as an existential presupposition; the use of gangstalking in this way presupposes it is. This implies that gangstalking is a valid and real concept. The determiner the is the most frequent collocate of gangstalking in our corpus, occurring in the L1 position ie, immediately to the left of gangstalking a total of 47 times in the corpus. Lexicalizing gangstalking with the definite article the frames it entirely as an entity external to the affected individual.

Moreover, use of the definite article indicates the verbal, as opposed to the nominal, gerund which conceptualizes a specific and actualized situation that is marked as identifiable [ 35 ]. The forum serves as a site of discursive contest between 2 competing worldviews.

According to one, the concerns about gangstalking reside within the affected individual as part of a medicalizing discourse. In this paradigm, the experience of gangstalking may be regarded as a chemical imbalance or psychological disturbance.

The countervailing view, by contrast, adopts a credulous persecutory discourse and posits that the difficulty is entirely due to the thoughts and behavior of malevolent others located outside of the affected individual.

Use of the determiner the anticipates this contest and supports the latter view, which is a minority discourse in psychiatric practice, but the majority in this corpus. This is achieved through the linguistic process of nominalization, in which the process of gangstalking is presented as a noun the gangstalking.

In the second extract above ie, Even I filed complaints … , for instance, it is not that the affected individual perceives that the gangstalking is becoming more intense or that they are being gangstalked more frequently, rather their post expresses the seemingly objective fact that their gangstalking has increased , once again presenting the phenomenon as incontrovertible. Representations of the gangstalking phenomenon invariably include references to the perpetrators of the conspiracy as well as affected individuals.

In the gangstalking community, the victims are usually known as targeted individuals. TI occurred times in the data, targeted times, and individuals 98 times, while targeted individual and targeted individuals occurred a total of 86 times. Among those affected, the perpetrators of gangstalking are known as perps. That word occurred times in the corpus.

The next most frequent collocate of gangstalking is the coordinating conjunction and , which occurs most commonly in the R1 position ie, directly following the node. As these examples attest, forum contributors use the conjunction to situate the gangstalking behavior within a matrix of similar persecutory and malicious behaviors. In this manner, members of this community construct gangstalking as an individual phenomenon that is intertwined with broader national and international conspiracies.

As an online phenomenon, this may also increase contact between individuals who experience gangstalking as an aspect of a persecutory delusion and members of internet conspiracy cultures more generally. Consistent with this claim, the most frequent keyword in our analysis was https , appearing times across of the comments. It was used in the context of URLs, pointing readers to other resources on the internet that commenters used to emphasize and elaborate on their ideas.

This speaks to the hyperlinked and connected nature of the internet and online communities but also to the nature of gangstalking as a belief system that has been popularized and shared through the networked communication of the web. Several of the keywords highlighted interpersonal themes.

This demonstrates that the gangstalking belief system is based on malicious interpersonal interactions. Both are indefinite pronouns and allow for doubt about who they are describing. This may speak to the inchoate nature of the belief system in which those affected are certain that they are being targeted even if they cannot always precisely pinpoint whom by.

One of the keyword categories pertains to the broad reach of the conspiracy. These words identify powerful state actors. Almost without exception, those affected cannot identify a single person or agent who is responsible for their persecution.

Some affected individuals construe the gangstalking as being retribution for a minor slight or altercation in the past. This formulation frames gangstalking as a process that is occurring outside the affected individual.

However, throughout the corpus, contributors also refer to the alternative view that gangstalking may be a psychological process. The keywords believe , mental , mind , and experience all draw attention to the epistemological and ontological challenges faced by those affected: what is really happening and how can one be sure? Individuals affected by gangstalking express concern about being able to demonstrate the veracity of their experiences.

Evidence occurs times in the corpus. Dietrich, Elizabeth E. Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons. Advanced Search. Skip to main content.

Smith ScholarWorks. Theses, Dissertations, and Projects. Title Gang stalking : internet connectivity as an emerging mental health concern. Author Elizabeth E. Keywords Online social networks-Psychological aspects, Cyberstalking-Psychological aspects, Delusions, Interpersonal relations, Theoretical, Emergent internet trends, Social contagion, Emergent norm theory, Relational theory, Delusional disorder. Abstract This study examines emerging concerns about small online social communities that purport to support their members, but which in actuality exacerbate mental health issues.

Comments iii, 45 pages. Recommended Citation Dietrich, Elizabeth E. Included in Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons.