This guest article by Keryl Egan first appeared in Training Australia Magazine,.

Bullying behaviours include not only observable and explicit humiliating abuse but also hidden, insidious attacks upon a person and their capacity to do their job, their enjoyment of productive working relationships and the advancement of their career. These bullying behaviours include...

• Blocking access to training and promotion
• Withholding information essential to do the job properly
• Spreading malicious rumours, lies, professional slurs
• Unfair use of disciplinary and assessment procedures
• Persistent undue criticism and scrutiny, inaccurate accusations about quality of work
• Setting workers up to fail by setting impossible deadlines and targets
• Undermining responsibility
• Isolation and coercion
• Creating a climate of fear via emotional abuse or public humiliation

To date, advice to those suffering psychological injury from this kind of bullying has centred around following a recommended grievance process or counselling for stress management. As a clinical psychologist, I have seen many people in my practice who take one to two years, sometimes more, to recover from a sustained bullying campaign in the workplace. Some never recover and withdraw from their profession or are permanently unable to perform at previous levels of competence and confidence. Others cannot adjust to the humiliating loss of status and career, nor can they accept that they are shells of their former selves. They become anxious and depressed, but they are also angry, not only at the bully but at the system which failed to protect them. Such post-traumatic stress results from the shattering of their assumptions about the basic goodness of human beings and about their own basic self-worth. Those who encountered a psychopathic type of bully have glimpsed an evil they had not thought possible in their ordinary working life in a "safe" Australian society. Read More