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ABSTRACT:
Workplace mobbing leads to severe health consequences, both physical and psychological. It can result in the destruction of an individual's personality and his effective expulsion front the labor force. The distinctive traits of highly gifted adults put them at increased risk of workplace mobbing. These traits may include their difference from others and others' misunderstanding of that difference, a distinct moral sense, drivenness and strength of feeling, perfectionism and estheticism, overwhelming perceptiveness, overwhelming multifacetedness, and the need for solitude and search for meaning. Paradoxically, however, the sensitivities and overexcitabilities of highly gifted adults may diminish their ability to interpret and confront the experience of being mobbed. Highly gifted adults who have been mobbed in the workplace may require differential therapeutic intervention, for the same reason that gifted children who are tormented by schoolyard bullies do.
This article is dedicated to Candice Lloyd.
The Ephesians would do well to hang themselves, every grown person of them, and leave the city to beardless lads; for they have cast out Hermodorus, the best person among them, saying, "We will have none who is best among us; if there be any such, let him be so elsewhere and among others."
Heraclitus
The purpose of this article is to draw attention to an issue that appears to be unrecognized in studies of highly gifted ex-children. The issue is "mobbing," a phenomenon of "psychological terror ... in working life [that] involves hostile and unethical communication, which is directed in a systematic way by one or a few individuals mainly towards one individual who is pushed into a helpless and defenseless position, being held there by means of continuing mobbing activities" (Leymann, 1996, p. 168). Only relatively recently have researchers and therapeutic workers given attention to the workplace mobbing of adults in general. I wish to offer the proposition that highly gifted ex-children are likely to suffer mobbing in the workplace out of proportion to their presence in the general workforce. Whether or not empirical study validates this proposition, I further assert that highly gifted ex-children who suffer mobbing in the workplace may require differential therapeutic intervention, for the same reason that gifted children who are tormented by bullies do.
"Mobbing" or "Bullying"?
Research on mobbing has so far...