Gangstalking

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Federal government websites often end in. The site is secure. Gangstalking refers to a novel persecutory belief system wherein sufferers believe that they are being followed, watched, and harassed by a vast network of people in their community who have been recruited as complicit perpetrators. They are frequently diagnosed as mentally ill, although they reject this formulation. Those affected by this belief system self-identify as targeted individuals TIs. They seek to prove the veracity of their persecution and dispute the notion that they are mentally ill by posting videos online that purport to provide evidence of their claims.

Gangstalking

Published on 5. Authors of this article:. Background: 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. The harassment is 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. Individuals affected by this belief system congregate in online fora to seek support, share experiences, and interact with other like-minded individuals. Such people identify themselves as targeted individuals. Objective: The objective of the study was to characterize the linguistic and rhetorical practices used by contributors to the gangstalking forum to construct, develop, and contest the gangstalking belief system. Methods: This mixed methods study employed corpus linguistics, which involves using computational techniques to examine recurring linguistic patterns in large, digitized bodies of authentic language data. Discourse analysis is an approach to text analysis which focuses on the ways in which linguistic choices made by text creators contribute to particular functions and representations. We assembled a ,word corpus of postings on a gangstalking support forum. We analyzed these data using keyword analysis, collocation analysis, and manual examination of concordances to identify discursive and rhetorical practices among self-identified targeted individuals. Results: The gangstalking forum served as a site of discursive contest between 2 opposing worldviews. 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.

Halliday M. Gangstalking Epidemiological data suggest that as many as 0.

She was born in Baltimore in and had a happy, healthy childhood—her younger brother Danny fondly recalls the treasure hunts she would orchestrate and the elaborate plays she would write and perform with her siblings. In her late teens, she developed anorexia and depression and was hospitalized for a month. Despite her struggles, she graduated high school and was accepted into a prestigious liberal arts college. There, things went downhill again. Among other issues, chronic fatigue led her to drop out. Over the next several years, she moved across the country sporadically and spontaneously—she began bouncing from Florida, where Danny lives, to Baltimore to see her grandmother, to Virginia, to Washington, DC, sometimes living in her car.

She was born in Baltimore in and had a happy, healthy childhood—her younger brother Danny fondly recalls the treasure hunts she would orchestrate and the elaborate plays she would write and perform with her siblings. In her late teens, she developed anorexia and depression and was hospitalized for a month. Despite her struggles, she graduated high school and was accepted into a prestigious liberal arts college. There, things went downhill again. Among other issues, chronic fatigue led her to drop out. Over the next several years, she moved across the country sporadically and spontaneously—she began bouncing from Florida, where Danny lives, to Baltimore to see her grandmother, to Virginia, to Washington, DC, sometimes living in her car. At 30, after experiencing delusions that she was pregnant, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Gangstalking

Posted October 20, Reviewed by Ekua Hagan. Every breath you take and every move you make Every bond you break, every step you take, I'll be watching you. These journalistic accounts—in the mainstream press, as well as in self-publication sites like Medium and two Vice documentary features for a chronological bibliography, see the references section at the end of this blogpost —offer intimate, sympathetic, and compelling portraits of those who identify as victims of gang stalking. By way of summary, T. Interviews often note that T.

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James , 2 and Jayden Roth 1. Increased risk of mental disorders among lifetime victims of stalking—Findings from a community study. Comparisons between content analyses of internet and questionnaire data on sequelae of being gang-stalked. Valentine et al [ 15 ]. Harnessing data to improve the equity, affordability, and quality of the health care system. 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. Breiding M. Collocations in context. This includes words like gangstalking itself, as well as words that label the various actors in the gangstalking universe including targeted individuals and perp. We used a constant comparison approach, moving between the codes, memos, conceptual framework, and primary data until theoretical saturation was achieved. This is the first study to examine the phenomena of the gang-stalking experiences using a methodology that allows categories to emerge de novo from subjective descriptions. The study of gang-stalking experiences must inevitably adopt an exploratory approach, given the lack of published studies in this area. 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. The categories of phenomena identified in the current study were found to have been experienced by cases in the earlier study.

Posted November 16, Reviewed by Lybi Ma. Big Brother isn't watching.

As Figure 11 demonstrates, TIs also make extensive use of framing to disconnect themselves from the perps represented in the videos. However, these and other definitions of delusions fall short, and arriving at a definitive definition may be impossible [ 49 ]. Introduction Gangstalking refers to a persecutory belief system wherein those affected believe they are being followed, watched, and harassed by many people in their community who have been recruited into a network of complicit perpetrators [ 1 ]. Such an image is known as a demand image [ 34 ] because the represented participants in this case, the TIs themselves engage the audience directly through their eye gaze and posture to request a relationship with them. 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. As predicted by interpersonal theory, this perceived hostility begets further hostility, leading to a positive feedback loop of ever-increasing hostility [ 44 ]. Comparison of Sequelae The same categories of sequalae were found in cases from the earlier study [ 4 ] as in the current study see Table 4. It is well established that online social support confers mental health benefits upon patients [ 36 , 37 ]. Staring therefore becomes evidence of widespread, orchestrated harassment. A Dictionary of Media and Communication. Yet, this is particularly relevant to contested health issues such as gangstalking, whose contested clinical status may result in those affected turning to peers rather than practitioners for advice and social support. They could be some powerful people. The US study also examined cases where the behavioural part of their definition of stalking was satisfied, but not the fear component. Although specific experiences of gangstalking vary between those affected, the various expressions of this polythetic belief system include a number of common elements.