Jean Ritchie - Stalkers

For many of these celebrity or stranger stalkers, with rejection comes anger and feelings of betrayal, which can lead to threats, obscene abuse and in some cases real violence.

Stalkers are all suffering from some degree of mental derangement, ranging from a severe psychotic illness like schizophrenia, in which the sufferer often believes he is responding to voices in his head which dictate his behaviour, to simple obsession, when behaviour can be quite normal in all other respects. This milder form is a version of more readily acceptable obsessions: there are football fanatics who plaster their bedroom walls with pictures of their favourite players and whose whole conversation and social life revolves around their team; there are railway enthusiasts who can crawl out of bed on cold wet mornings to collect train numbers at grimy stations; there are fitness freaks who suffer from withdrawal symptoms if they don’t get their daily workout. What starts as an interest and a hobby edges into a position of paramount importance; for the stalker it is the same slow build up. Many adolescents have crushes on music and film stars which are gradually superseded by real-life love affairs. Many people keep their youthful infatuations with them for life – plenty of happily married mothers and grandmothers turn up to have their heartstrings fluttered by Cliff Richard or Tom Jones in concert. But they have a sense of proportion: the rock star is a small and harmless helping of escapism. For a few, though, real life cannot or does not take the place of the fantasy, and the obsession with the star builds up until it dominates life enough to turn the fan into a fanatic, the fanatic into a stalker.

Similarly, a normal part of the business of growing up is to experience a painful love affair, to be rejected, to love unrequited from afar. Anyone who claims never to have been let down in love is probably lying or has a conveniently selective memory. Getting over it can be painful and protracted: adolescents, particularly, are inclined to feel that they will never love again. As Plato said, love is a serious mental condition: love casts out intelligence. The vast majority, of course, do get over it; for one or two, the experience assumes such epic dimensions that it dominates their lives, and the person they love becomes the focus of an obsession.

This is the more rational end of stalking, the tipping of the balance from the normal madness of love to unacceptable behaviour. Many a young person will have dialled the number of the person who is ignoring them, and then hung up. Many will have hung around the college corridors or the pubs and clubs their loved one frequents in the hope of catching a glimpse, even though they know that their affection is not returned. When the dialling of the phone number and the hanging around become a habit, then the delicate balance has shifted.

But there are much wilder shores of stalking, and these are the shores of clinical madness, where the stalker is psychotically ill. Because these stalkers dance to the tunes of their own fractured minds, they will not respond to normal reasoning or pleading, to the law, to physical threats, to anything. Imprisoning the mentally ill does not help, although holding them in secure mental hospitals is sometimes the only consolation that the victims can hope for because, as with so much psychotic illness, containment and not cure is all that can be provided.

David Nias is a clinical psychologist who lectures at London University, and who has worked at Broadmoor Hospital, a secure unit for the criminally insane, and has studied the varying degrees and effects of obsession. Many stalkers, he believes, are suffering from a condition known as De Clerembault’s Syndrome, named after the French doctor who discovered it. Sufferers put romantic constructions on to the most innocuous exchanges, eventually losing touch with reality and becoming obsessed with an unobtainable person, believing that this person reciprocates their feelings. They commonly believe that other people or things are thwarting the relationship. In this extreme form the condition is known as erotomania.

‘All the old clichés about love are true: life-long passion, madly in love, blinded by love, hopelessly in love. They are all, quite literally, true for some people. The classic symptoms are delusion,’ says Dr Nias. ‘The person who stalks a stranger, a celebrity or someone they only know slightly is usually a psychotic, carrying delusions about someone who is in a higher position socially and with whom they have very little in common. They become convinced this person is in love with them and plague their lives. They are irrational, and however hard you try to dissuade them they can come up with evidence of their own that their beliefs are true. They are, quite literally, madly in love.

‘Some doctors believe that erotomania, the delusion that one is loved by another, is a form of schizophrenia, and treat patients with major tranquillizers (anti-psychotic drugs: the name is misleading because they are not related to normal tranquillizers). If they have come to the attention of the medical profession because their behaviour has been inappropriate, they are often held in secure units until it is judged medically that they are safe to be released. But the trouble is that away from their obsession many of them seem perfectly normal, rational people.

‘They try to persuade doctors that they are over their obsession: then you visit their room and the wall is plastered with pictures or references to their victim. The most worrying aspect is that this sort of personality disorder can lead to suicide and the threat to take other lives, particularly that of their victim. Often the fantasies get sicker, more sordid and more frightening as the condition progresses.

‘The people who suffer from obsession are usually rather pathetic, unsuccessful at sexual relations. The obsession feeds their imagination. Anyone in the public eye can be selected as a target, but not only celebrities are at risk. Anyone thought of as a superior could be a victim: women could fall for their GP, priest or bank manager, men with a work colleague, a barmaid or the girl next door. There are quite a few cases in Broadmoor of patients who are dangerously in love with ordinary people.

‘Obsession and stalking can be separate, although they are close. Obsession is a very intense feeling of acute need. There is a childish level of demand for another person, a wave of inner desperation and desolation that makes the sufferer want to own the victim. Obsession affects more men than women. It can be biological, or the result of childhood traumas or problems. The difficulty with knowing whether obsessive love is dangerous is that a lot of people have suffered some form of it: the pangs of despised love, as Hamlet called it, are familiar enough. In some ways it is just an extreme of an emotion we all possess: arguably some of the greatest love affairs are obsessive, frantic and jealous. But the need to know everything about a new partner is not normal, not just an extension of passion: it is a mental disorder.

‘Stalking is often just seeing someone out of reach. Becoming fixated on a stranger is a useful way of avoiding reality – there is less chance of the fantasy being broken. It is a personality disorder, and you only really hear about it when it comes to court: at the lower levels the stalker is merely infatuated, and unless their behaviour presents a real threat to the person they love it does not come to public notice. Many do not even want to make direct contact with their love object, but some do. The sufferer will build up a fantasy world around the person and follow them to find out every detail of their lives. At first the stalker may send polite notes and flowers to try to attract their victim’s attention, but as these are ignored the stalker becomes gradually more angry. The tone of the notes becomes abusive, showing the signs of frustration that lead to aggression.