 Our next talk is here in Dextra. It's a little bit complicated theme, cyber-stalking, when lines are crossed. It's delivered by Jan Calvitzer, who is an MD in psychiatric MD in Berlin. He researches about technical development and has written a book called Digital Paranoia. And his co-talk is psychological. Psychological. Psychological. Damn it. Psychiatrists. Sorry. I do the slides. Hello. We are Corinna and Jan. I give an introduction because I researched this theme. Basically, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts do not observe their patients in social media. We do not stalk our clients. Nonetheless, I read a lot of Twitter and Facebook. And I want to find out how aggressions work. I was once part of an international shitstorm. I never could manage to have a fight on Twitter. We all have contact in our professional fields with stalking. And we are projection screens for our patients. And we have to draw lines. We also work with people who are stalkers. I want to say a couple of words about that. First of all, I would like to speak about our relationship to psychiatry. Do anybody know the Rosenhan experiment? Anybody else? The Rosenhan experiment was done by David Rosenhan and was an important experiment for the psychiatry in the United States. David Rosenhan proved how arbitrary psychiatric diagnoses are. I would like to introduce you to this experiment. Rosenhan was a psychologist and sent his colleagues into psychiatric hospitals. They said that they were hearing a voice saying meaningless words and nothing else. They were admitted at psychiatric hospitals and sometimes were treated for weeks and weeks. At the beginning they were giving notes, but nobody took them seriously. For example, one of the people asked, when can I get out of here? And the doctor never reacted to his request. The diagnostics of psychiatry are arbitrary. Even though these people were totally normal and as soon as you have a diagnosis, this is a stigma to you. People would treat you differently. There was one clinic that would never have happened to us. There was really the beautiful part of this experiment. Rosenhan said, okay, send us your actors and we will sort them out. They thought, maybe 42, maybe 45 people were actors from Rosenhan, but Rosenhan never sent them anything. This was the second proof. So then there was another stigma in place of being an actor and not really psychiatrically sick. At this time they wanted to establish clear categories of mental illness. And Rosenhan proved that this is super arbitrary. And on the other hand there was a lot of scientific research that was supposed to be standardized. So if you have a couple of symptoms for a time, A, B, and C, you get a diagnosis no matter what you do before or what you do after that. When you had a personal tragedy and then you develop a depression, then you get the same diagnosis as somebody who has developed the symptoms out of clear blue sky. We have totally reproducible diagnosis, but they're not fitting with humans. And that's a huge risk in psychiatry. And I think that's psychiatric diagnosis are important when they save people from arbitrary actions. People sitting alone in their practices and it would be terrible if people just imagined stuff like in the Rosenhan experiment when people just said, let's do this with you when people already have that much power about ours. Use diagnosis when they are actually useful not to judge and stigmatize people. Now, some words with a victim and perpetrator definition. We try not to use these words and we're saying doers and don'ts. This is usually very clear. A person who gets stalked by others who just don't know them and just want a victim because they want to feel powerful. I want to make others feel bad. This can be very one sided. But there are cases where it's a self strengthening spiral, a devil's spiral. So this dynamic where people are ghosting each other, ghosting is where someone cancels contact, doesn't react to messages anymore. Maybe you were a couple before and the one person ghosts and the other person doesn't even notice they're stalker. But tries to get some clarity and gets ever ever more threatening messages. The other people react and maybe their social competence is missing and there is this self strengthening circle and the question is how do we solve this conflict ideally. If we have one person that stalks another, there's one important aspect. We don't talk about much enough that we can solve this with more people. Data security has to be done with other people. Stalking is the same. You can't really say I'm being stalked and what can I do. You can't say do this and this and it will help. You need to tell other people around this person and I see someone around me is afflicted. I have to ask what's going on, how can I help? It's just as important, can you see that? Just as important that the humans around the doing person stalking stems from couples, from divorces. It's very important that everyone around the doing person reacts. If you see this person is very aggressive against someone else, writing messages. You ask what are you doing there, what's going on? You don't do with a perpetrator a victim different situation. Instead you just ask both what's going on so there's not this defensive stance people have to take. The problem with that is, of course around the doing person some will see this is not okay behavior. But there will always be allies. Nowadays some of you will know that there are groups coming from anonymity destroying people. On Twitter you can see this a lot of time, mostly women. This woman is too self-justified, we will attack her. But if it's from a divorce there are both sides mostly. In such a situation it's important to not exclude people from the social community at once or threatening it. Because the problem is we are in a big restructuration where values are changing. And if we react too harshly against crossing the lines of these new limits and make shame people, we make a border to that society, the community and we exclude the person. And this may cause some people to want to go away from that person. If you do this, if you start we don't want to be on your side. But this leads to a relationship with others outside of the community which is growing. People who are not doing okay things, they are just making groups outside of the major society. And these people feel very good in their bubble. The dramatic thing is that these things what we are doing don't really help. When positive reinforcement would work much better. But these means don't work with people who are outside of society already. If you are outside of society what can we do to you? That's nothing really. If you push people into the perpetrator role too much it gets toxic. Because they get nihilistic, they get cynical and you can't talk to them anymore. In their situation where you have to react, you have to exclude people from society, community. You have to use the harsh sanctions you can get, of course. But I would say for the introduction we have to think about what doses of an action we want to use to be effective. And we have to try to reduce the amount of people who are outside of the community being hateful and spiteful. I would like to in the end say how you can find help within and without the system. How you can find helpers outside of the psychiatric system. It's completely fine not to go to your therapist if you don't want to just because you don't share their point of view or their process of thought. I think that we are kind of overstepping every once in a while. There's a lot of times where stuff was dealt with within a family and you would have gone to a priest or to someone else and that weren't considered a disease but considered a problem within society and now they're being individualized. And now you alone, your individual have to go and see a therapist. I think that's wrong. I believe that's wrong. I don't think that's necessary. But if you do want to seek help, you should consider two criteria. When it comes to stalking, it's important that you need to find people that think beyond the schemes of perpetrator, predator and victim. If you go to somebody who will say we're not talking to predators that can cause, the problem is that that will not solve the situation. If you're in a person that's affected and you would realize you would like to aim for mediation and you have somebody at your side who is thinking in this clear schemata, it's important to find somebody that's beyond that consistent. It doesn't necessarily mean that they can't take your side in this but you need to understand that they need to get involved. You have to also consider that helpers should not be emotionally involved. If you have groups where people who help and are allies and are completely emotional dedicated to this problem can lead and become to a problem for those that are getting helped because they're not thinking rationally anymore. If you have too much empathy, you cannot help well. This sounds strange to you but if you feel everything that a person that you're trying to help, then you're going to be exhausted quite quickly and that's the other danger. The helper syndrome, I mean it's quite a familiar term, has the big problem that if people privately like to help a lot and are emotionally involved all the time, they could be addicted to this. They could be codependent on this and this big problem of codependency when it comes to the helper syndrome, if you're a helper, if you're a part of the community that helps, that are not in these classical structures and that need this feeling of being a helper, they need the problem to sustain because they need the other people to have the problem because then they can continue to help. So sometimes that's something that you need to be careful and watch out for and you get out of that. Those are two things that I want to pass on advice. Therapists have realized this and those are the two things that I want to give you as an advice for support systems and I would pass on to you. Exactly. I would like to define stalking. We heard a lot about stalking. I would like to go deeper on the meaning. The word stalking comes from the English language. It appeared firstly in the 80s. It was translated from stalking, from hunting language. In the 80s and 90s it was used for fans stalking their idols and threatening them. That's where the termini came from and was introduced in this way into the German language. The phenomenon of stalking was introduced into law making in 2007-2008 with an explicit paragraph. Stalking is not a phenomenon of the modern times. We find it in Ovid's Metamorphosis in the media in the 90s. It was reached in the light of the popular culture. The first definition that I found and scientific context was a definition by Dresing and Gast 2003. It was defined as a pattern of behavior where one person follows, disturbs and threatens somebody else and basically attacks them physically and in some cases even kills them. There's a bunch of other criteria that are being applied to these studies. I wanted to point out the central aspects of studies. There's a temporal scope of this. Some people say it's two weeks, three weeks. That's a question of debate to be honest. There's formal criteria that are important. There's the second definition that we're going to. Cyber stalking. We have another talk after this. We all know what we're talking about. Cyber stalking is something that within media is highly discussed. The academic database, however, is not very well elaborated and there's no big studies done so far. What we can say so far is that the definition based on Dresing and others is cyber stalking is the contentful, repeated and unwished for contact based on computer communication techniques. By using these techniques there is happening defamation, threats. Those are kind of the central criteria for definition of cyber stalking. It's not its own entity. It's a part of stalking in the grander scheme. Cyber stalking is a sub form of stalking or one means of expression of stalking. There's very few stalking cases or no stalking cases where cyber stalking is not part of the stalking process itself. What I would like to quickly introduce is the epidemiology. How much stalking is actually happening? So there's a couple of studies that were done. There's one that was from 2015. It's the most current from Hellman and Klim. It's a quite representative study and it's about how popular in quotation marks is stalking. The lifetime prevalence is about 20% within women. Within women there's factors such as current relationship if you live alone or with other people. It's something that can then go up until 32%. The curious thing about this study is that they tried to find out who are the stalking executors. Are these only men? Are these women affected by stalking? The study showed that 64.6% were women and in those cases the executors were largely male, 60.2% and only 4.4% women. By male people were affected by stalking, this quota turns around and women are the majorities of the stalking executors. So that's 23.5%. And as mentioned before, cyber stalking there's no actual representative's epidemiological studies done yet. But what we know so far, next slide please. In the past there was a different divide between traditional stalking by telephone, unwanted telephone calls, SMS and personal looking for the person. Sending packages, cyber stalking if you're looking at it, very few studies actually exist. Usually people see contact over social media, chat, email or blogs. If you look at it, how concretely do they manifest the episodes? Mostly these two methods are combined. So new techniques of cyber stalking are part of the mix. Especially as psychologists we ask ourselves, and you also, why do people stalk? For us this question is important in our professional context, why we ask this question. What are the motives? Why do we want to understand that? So it's about helping people who are the done-bys or doers. And that's why we have to understand why and how people stalk. The motives that lie behind them. And on top of that, what we want to do is help people. Also the risk factor analysis, is there a danger here for people who are done-tos or third-person actors? And if we look at this collection of motives, I would like to go a little deeper in these four kinds of motives. And to show the reasons behind these reasons. The first motive is loneliness and seeking of love. Behind that we have emotions like loneliness, missing of love. And they want to create an intimate relationship. Looking for soulmates. People are looking for soulmates. The focus is not on and they create fictive or even relationships and to substitute real relationships. The real acting of the done-bys has no consequence on the doer. For people who do this out of these motives. The done-bys are usually known in the wider social circles. We often have schizophrenic patients with that. Love drunkenness. Love mania. Loneliness is a big part of that. I'm not happy about loneliness. And research is called social incompetence. So this is the motive behind that. The wish, the longing for human contact. It's not about finding your soulmate. It's about establishing friendship or sexual relationship. Mostly targets are here. People who are unknown to the stalker. The modes of reaching contact are very, very... The background of these people is mainly that these people have somewhat limited capabilities when it comes to social skills. Which is important to know for giving these people help. What's important for people affected by executors of stalking of this shape or form is that the stalkers will narrow down and reduce their behavior once they realize that they are not successful with it. This is not true for everyone but it's true for a large group of people that fall under and act out of this motive. The other one in the next group is rejection, seeking, resolution or revenge. A lot of times these are really closely related to the people who are affected, ex-partners, friends. Triggers of these usually are the ending of a relationship. So stalking compensates the loss of that intimate relationship. So it's a way of trying to keep this relationship up. And a lot of times people who are executing the stalking are reporting that the relationship can't be over. They have a very strong focus on the end of the relationship and how that's something that they want to avoid by all means. A lot of times the motives that are prevalent are on the one hand resolution but at the same time revenge. So you feel rejected and denied and these two motives are being mixed and the ambivalence within emotions is already prevalent. Another motive is to be diminished and this usually is coupled with seeking revenge as well. Subjectively speaking people who are being executors of stalking of this kind, they feel completely like they've lost control and they are seeking to regain power and control because they feel humiliated. And the last motive of the five big ones is mainly driven by power and sexuality. And those are mainly stalkers, executing stalkers, sadists. It's a small, very small group of people. And if we look at these, look at the next slide. Consequences for people stalking, affected by this sort of stalking is obviously 50% of people report they have symptoms of a psychological disease like panic attack, uneasiness, loss of control. This continuously in heightened stress levels and this is the manifestation that can enable psychological things to develop. Some people develop problems sleeping, people tend to have a complete behaviour driven towards security and they are afraid. And this over long term leads to loss of social contact and they need to move, they need to change job in order to avoid the stalking. This can obviously have economic consequences as well and all these factors basically are laying the groundwork for psychological problems to develop further. The ones who are executing the stalking are also, if I can quickly, so people who are executing the stalking are also drawing back from their social networks, their social circles and they're primarily engaging in their stalking behaviour. So that's a sickening fixation what happens is so they will start relating to other people who are engaging in the same kind of behaviour. So this is kind of like a circle of death. So these descriptions of these dynamics of perpetrators, the way that they are perceived, we're talking about the people who are executing this, they're being perceived as perpetrators only and the surrounding can act on this. If the people around them say well maybe this is somebody that just feels lonely and we need to have this analysis to do something. The surroundings need, if you are realising that somebody around you is fixating on one person, especially in the beginning and the early steps, you can step in and intervene and you can help, obviously first of all help the person who are affected but maybe also the person who is the one who is executing this. Most of all the request was to ask how can I help when people around me, when there is a case of stalking in my environment, maybe someone is doing it or is done on two. The important thing is like Jan already talked about the stalkers are, they keep their social contacts because they need them. We have this model of our psychical health is like a house and the foundation of that is like the social environment, social contacts. The others are like work, other identity, creating things. The less you have of these the more unstable this house becomes, your health deteriorates and you have to keep this foundation. And people who are stalked tell them you are not alone, we are there. And these strong emotions that people who get stalked feel like loss of control, you have to compensate for that. And what you have to watch out for, if you want to help, that you look out for your own limits because you could also feel loss of control and you have to know how to handle these emotions and know your own limits in your head. And with these helpful measures go to information places, to psychologists, do stuff together. So don't focus too much on the stalking. But also what can we do together strengthening the relationship, the quality of relationship. We only have five minutes left, so we have to go a bit faster. So we couldn't do it faster, so whatever, it's okay. That's fine. The important thing is like we said, know your own limits and say, okay, it's also important. Some say they feel anger and I want this to stop. I will go to them and tell them, stop this. We would say don't do that, don't be an intermediate because the dynamics can go wild very easily. So let's not do that, especially if you don't know other factors. If you have a stalker, don't force them, don't insult them. It's important that you say, hey, this is not okay, your behavior. But that you also say that you care for your friend and that you are worried about your friend. Like have these social contacts, give them the possibility to get help or whatever. So this too, there's the social function, it's very important. It's also important to not be intermediate in this place. And of course to look out for your own limits. Yeah, that's the most the sensuous thing is the like breaking the isolation. So you can still have some kind of sanction left and that for the stalked person the mental health impacts are too great. And like below half of stalked people are looking for psychological help. And that's not cool. Like in therapy, call it therapy, we try to help them how do you cope with this. And like obsessive thoughts, thoughts and stuff that we try to limit this. Like what are the consequences if you are always afraid to go out? If you are always afraid of the stalker. So yeah, this will bring more social isolation and like your health problems will get worse. And we will try to get out of this vicious circle. And yeah, I think that's it. I believe mostly that the white ring, how to analyze stalking. I would like to show you the interventional program of the white ring. If you are stalking is done to you, you can go there and they will help you. They will analyze your state. How is it looking? Is there the threat of violence? Does it make sense to go to the police? They will help you. They will advise you. They will always look how are you doing? They help you psycho-socially. They are groups. They will talk to you. And this exists concretely in Berlin but also in other parts of Germany. And there are also programs for people who stalk. Where are group settings and these themes are rose. What are your motives? What lies behind that? And they will give you strategies that are fitting to your motives. And if you need that, find that on the internet. Thank you. Thank you.