MY LETTER TO SARAH PALIN, WORKPLACE BULLYING (part 4)

Included in the fifty page letter I wrote to Sarah Palin was information about workplace bullying and how it had affected me. When I sent it to her the spring of 2008 I did not know anything about her. I assumed she was a competent person as she had been elected governor. I had no idea she did not respond to the problems of the people of Alaska or her personal life was such a twisted mess. I expected her to respond and be concerned about what was going on with workplace bullying in Alaska and the other problems. Instead her staff told me the department of law told them not to talk to me or help me with anything. I have come to realize that Sarah Palin is a workplace bully herself, there will be future discussion of that subject.

I became suicidal and was arrested for implementing a plan to kill myself by taking drugs from the narcotic lock up at Norton Sound Hospital in Nome Alaska on 11/12/05. I had been systematically psychologically tortured by two serial bullies who were nurses in mid-management and their minions. They were assisted by their lesser bullies who were mostly nurses, but in the end a small number of doctors were involved. I lasted for 20 months, most of their victims only lasted a few months before they left town. I was confused about what was happening. I planned to leave twice and one of the serial bullies talked me into staying because “we love you” and they wanted me to stay. Afterwards she would torture me and treat me like she did not want me there. Their main targets before me were bullied until they left. They behaved and looked like they were going to have a nervous breakdown.  Several people at one time are bullied, but there is usually a main target which a lot of energy is focused on. When the current main target leaves, the serial bullies usually take two days to two weeks to start on another main target. I could not figure out what was going on it is so strange. Complaining about the unsafe nursing care, the horrible treatment of the native patients, a doctor who prescribed large amounts of narcotics, having intoxicants dumped in the ER inappropriately, their practice of having medivac missions with non-flight trained and uncertified nurses and other issues exacerbated their psychological attacks, but did not stop me from continuing to voice my opinions.  

When a victim of workplace bullying has PTSD and then has to deal with a corrupt legal system it makes them sicker. I had to live in Nome where I often saw the perpetrators when I went to the store, was harassed by the police, got death threats on my phone, had no income, had health problems(many caused by the PTSD) and had to go to the hospital where the workplace bullying originally took place for health care and got nothing but abuse(medical bullying), and then when I moved away the corrupt assistant DA Earthman and Judge Esch had me wrongfully arrested. I was tortured in the prison system and my medication (antidepressant and seizure medication) was withheld from me even though I brought it and they did not have to pay for it. That made me very ill for a long time. The wrongful incarceration caused my cat’s death and the loss and destruction of my possessions. When layer after layer of trauma occurs it makes PTSD extraordinarily bad. It is only now that I can look at what happened and not completely loose it. When I wrote the letter to Sarah Palin I got so ill afterwards it looked like I may have multiple sclerosis. Since then the symptoms have improved a great deal. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder causes physical symptoms and can even be life threatening.

My goal is to make the public aware of this psychological torture in our workplaces which can facilitate change and help individuals find help if they are under attack from one or more workplace bullies. Workplace bullying is a huge problem in the US, but it is worse  in Alaska because a lot of these bullies were gotten rid of by former employers and they kept moving on until they came to Alaska. They end up in places where employees with certain skills are hard to get. Then they work their way into management and get control of companies. Not very many people even know about workplace bullying. In many other countries it is illegal and there are programs in place to assist victims. Education programs have been implemented by other countries to help people recognize it and get help. In France they have boards to report it to as it harms society. It causes a loss of money to the corporations where it goes on, loss of careers, loss of productive workers, a drain on social security and the health care system, illness in victims, and negative affects harm those who watch it happen(they don’t know what to do and are afraid they will be next). It has been described by some as the main cause of the nursing shortage and by others as one of the main causes. Other countries are working on the problem, but here in the US it remains a huge problem. Fifteen states have had legislature written against it, but nothing has passed.

In Alaska it is very bad in the bush just as it is in the bush in Australia. The difference is in Australia they wanted to know why so many of those nurses were suicidal and did something about it. There are  lots of signs in Alaska, an employee at a hospital shot two specific people, his supervisors. A nurse sued a doctor who got her fired because she reported him for not putting on scrubs and scrubbing into the OR. She was the one who was right, but lost the case. In the hospital where I was targeted one person after another was harmed by the serial bullies and their clique over many years and it still goes on. Staff in behavioral health knew about it, yet nothing was done to stop it. It is considered an occupational health hazard, yet when a nurse looses it from being psychologically tortured there is no counseling, just arrest and more torture. If you are in a judicially backwards state like Alaska you may even be prevented from having a defense in court.
The people who do this are very sick people who usually are not good at their jobs. The people they target are the ones who have a lot of good qualities. They are jealous and resentful and go after the best because they make them look bad. Below is the information in my Letter to Sarah Palin about the inclident which I also faxed  to several senators and got no response from any of them. I hope it will help someone identify why their life at work is a living hell and give them a place to start searching for an answer.


The Workplace Bullying Institute's Definition of the Phenomenon Of Workplace Bullying:

Workplace Bullying is repeated, health-harming mistreatment of one or more persons (the targets) by one or more perpetrators(the bullies) that takes one or more of the following forms:

verbal abuse
offensive conduct/behaviors (including nonverbal) which are threatening, humiliating or intimidating
work interference -- sabotage -- which prevents work from getting done.
Workplace Bullying: (a) is driven by perpetrators' need to control the targeted individual(s) , (b) is initiated by bullies who choose targets, timing, place and methods, ©) escalates to involve others who side with the bully, either voluntarily through coercion, and it (d) undermines legitimate business interests when bullies' personal agendas take precedence over work itself.

(This is the very short form)
Bullying, general workplace harassment, is more prevalent than its more famous and illegal special varieties--sexual harassment and racial discrimination. The largest scientific study conducted in the U.S. found that 37% U.S. workers have directly experienced destructive bullying. That is approximately 54 million Americans! And additional 12% of the workforce witnessed it. Half of the workers are intimately familiar with bullying. The other half (45%) claim to not have either seen, heard or experienced it themselves.
Bullying transcends gender. Women comprise the majority of targets and women bullies especially target other women. The vast majority of bullies (73%) are bosses.
Bullies bully because they can; they do so with impunity. Bullies are rarely psychopathic, but are always narcissistic and Machiavellian.
Bullying is mostly legal. Employers can ignore it with little risk. However, it is four times more prevalent than illegal status-based (or grounds-based) discrimination. In North America, only two Canadian provinces have addressed bullying -- Quebec and Saskatchewan. In the U.S., a movement is growing to introduce and pass state legislation.
Workplace Bullying is more similar to the Holocaust and Domestic Violence than to schoolyard, childhood bullying.

Bullying Compromises Targets' Health and Safety. It's a Public Health Hazard

The reason for the movement itself is because of bullying's impact on human workers!
WBI research illustrates that individuals are targeted primarily because they pose a perceived threat to the bully. Characteristics of the typical Target (WBI 2000 study):
 (1) independent, refuses to act subserviently,
(2) is more technically skilled than the bully,
(3) is better liked, has emotional intelligence and social skills, and
(4) has the honesty and ethics of a whistleblower.
Targets are non-confrontive. They do not respond to aggression with aggression. (They are thus morally superior.) But the price paid for apparent submissiveness is that the bully can act with impunity (as long as the employer also does nothing).
According to the 2007 WBI-Zogby Survey, 45% of targeted individuals suffer stress-related health problems.
Stress-Related Physical Health Complications
- Cardiovascular problems: hypertension to strokes, heart attacks
- Adverse Neurological changes: neurotransmitter disruption, hippocampus shrinkage
- Immunological impairment: more frequent infections of greater severity

- Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Psychological-Emotional Injuries
- Debilitating Anxiety, Panic Attacks (>80%)
- Clinical Depression: new to person or exacerbated condition previously controlled (39%)
- Post-traumatic Stress (PTSD) from deliberate human-inflicted abuse (30% of targeted women; 21% of men)
Economic Devastation
- Lost ability to be left alone to do the once-"loved job"
- Forced to transfer from loved job, often a punitive transfer (13%)
- Constructively discharged without reasonable cause (24%)
(from the website of the Workplace Bullying Institute, www.bullyinginstitute.org)
( From the website about the research Dr. Leymann did over about twenty years about workplace bullying and it’s resulting PTSD.)
Our present hypothesis is that PTSD develops more severely if the traumatic situations last a long time and are followed by rights violations such as those conflicted by the judicial system or within the health care community, continue over a long period.
If we compare the difficulty of diagnosing our patients with that of, for example, individuals who have run-over and killed suicidal persons on train (Malt, Leymann et al., 1993) or subway tracks (Theorell, Leymann, Jodko, Konarski, & Norbeck, 1994), we see pronounced differences. In general, people seem to be able to intuitively imagine how it must feel to try to brake a train that weighs hundreds of tons and how it feels, despite these desperate efforts, to finally run over the person who has laid on the tracks in order to die. Nevertheless, the driveŕs PTSD reaction is - statistically speaking - very much milder than that of our patients. Also, a considerably smaller proportion of train engineers suffer a PTSD reaction or share severe PTSD diagnose. Indeed the number is very small in comparison with that which prevails for patients such as ours, who almost all were diagnosed as having severe PTSD. This comparison might illustrate what the latter group of patients must have gone through in terms of psychological pain, anxiety, degradation, helplessness - that led to such extensive PTSD injuries. The reactions of our patients can, on the other hand, be compared with those accounted for in a Norwegian study concerning raped women (Dahl, 1989). http://www.leymann.se/english/frame.html)
Thus, our patients, like raped women, find themselves under a continuing threat. As long as the perpetrator is free, the woman can be attacked again. As long as the mobbed individual does not receive effective support, he or she can be torn to pieces again at any time.
Thus, these individuals find themselves in a prolonged stress- and in a prolonged trauma-creating situation. Instead of a short, acute (and normal!) PTSD reaction that can subside after several days or weeks, theirs is constantly renewed: new traumata and new sources of anxiety arise in a constant stream during which time the individual experiences rights violations that further undermine his or her self-confidence and psychological health. The unwieldy social situation for these individuals consists not only of severe psychological trauma but of an extremely prolonged stress condition that seriously threatens the individual's socio-economic existence. Torn out of their social network, the majority of mobbing victims face the threat of early retirement, with permanent psychological damage. (This section is from Dr. Leymann’s website. He has unfortunately passed away.)
Our present hypothesis is that PTSD develops more severely if the traumatic situations last a long time and are followed by rights violations such as those conflicted by the judicial system or within the health care community, continue over a long period.

(www.leymann.se/english/frame.html)

“The Nurses in Hostile Work Environment’s 2003 Report” that bullying is very prevalent in hospitals and workplaces across the United States (US) to the extent that 70% of victims leave their job, 33% of these victims leave for health reasons and 37% because of manipulated performance appraisals. After much study Cooper and Swanson concluded that workplace bullying is a significant, under-reported, and under-recognized occupational safety and health problem. This section will now discuss the origins of workplace bullying.


Stress-Related Illnesses
Victims of bullying may show symptoms of nausea, headache, weight loss, insomnia, anxiety, depression, alcoholism, irritability, loss of libido, self doubt, and Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSS) (Canadian Initiative on Workplace Violence Website, 2007; Gilmour & Hamlin, 2005; Hoel, Faragher & Cooper, 2004; Jackson, Clare, & Mannix, 2002; Knight, 2004). A study done on healthcare professionals in the UK (Hoel et al.) concluded that one in five people being bullied at work exhibit symptoms of PTSS, such as hyper-arousal, feelings of constant anxiety, over-vigilance, avoidance of traumatizing events, and flashbacks. Other research on nurses in the UK (Patten, 2005) has shown that between one-third and one-half of stress-related-sickness absenteeism results from workplace bullying. Patten found that this stress often results in nurses giving up or having fractured careers with serious implications both personal (loss of financial security) and organizational (loss of a valuable employee).
Suicide
Even more serious than stress-related illnesses is stress-related suicide. Hastie (2007) described one young Australian midwife who had entered nursing in 1995 with enthusiasm, passion, and commitment. This midwife had experienced hostility, criticism, and intimidation in her practice, which eventually lead her to taking her life by asphyxiation. Although this event occurred over ten years ago in Australia, Canada is presently reporting one out of seven adult suicides results from workplace bullying (Workplace Bullying Institute, 2003).

http://www.nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/ANAMarketplace/ANAPeriodicals/OJIN/%20TableofContents/vol132008/No3Sept08/ArticlePreviousTopic/NursetoNurseBullying.aspx

http://www.bullyonline.org/