Psychological harassment is a pattern of repeated behavior designed to intimidate, humiliate, isolate, or emotionally wear down another person. It can happen at work, in personal relationships, or in any setting where one person holds power over another. Unlike a single rude comment or a bad day with a coworker, psychological harassment is defined by its persistence: the behavior is systematic and targeted, and its cumulative effect is what causes real harm.
The International Labour Organization’s Convention No. 190, the first international standard to define workplace violence and harassment, describes it as a “range of unacceptable behaviours and practices, or threats thereof, whether a single occurrence or repeated, that aim at, result in or are likely to result in physical, psychological, sexual or economic harm.” That broad definition captures something important: what matters is the impact on the person receiving it, not just the intent behind it.
How It Differs From Bullying and Mobbing
You’ll see the terms psychological harassment, bullying, and mobbing used almost interchangeably, and the overlap is real. “Bullying” is the more common term in the U.S. and U.K., while “mobbing” is widely used in Scandinavia and continental Europe. All three describe systematic, repeated mistreatment directed at one person. The researcher Heinz Leymann, who pioneered the study of workplace abuse in the 1990s, defined mobbing as “hostile and unethical communication that is directed in a systematic way by one or more persons, mainly towards one targeted individual.”
The practical distinction is subtle. Mobbing typically involves a group dynamic, where several people participate in targeting one individual. Bullying often implies a one-on-one power imbalance. Psychological harassment is the broadest of the three terms and can describe either pattern, in any context. If you’re trying to name what’s happening to you, the label matters less than recognizing the behavior itself.
What It Looks Like at Work
Roughly one in ten employees report experiencing bullying or harassment at work in the past year, based on a cross-sectional survey of nearly 4,000 workers in England published in BMC Public Health. That number likely understates the problem, since many people don’t label their experience as harassment until long after it starts.
Some workplace behaviors are obvious: name-calling, public humiliation, threats, mockery, or deliberate interference with someone’s ability to do their job. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lists offensive jokes, slurs, intimidation, ridicule, insults, and put-downs as examples of conduct that can constitute harassment when it creates a hostile work environment.
But psychological harassment at work is often far more subtle than that. It can look like being deliberately excluded from meetings, having information withheld so you can’t do your job properly, receiving impossible deadlines with no support, or being subjected to excessive monitoring that no one else on the team faces. A manager who consistently takes credit for your work, reassigns your responsibilities without explanation, or publicly questions your competence on minor issues is engaging in a pattern that fits the definition. These behaviors are harder to point to individually, but over weeks and months, they erode your confidence and professional standing.
Covert Forms That Are Harder to Recognize
Research on subtle and covert abuse has organized these harder-to-detect behaviors into three broad categories: undermining, limiting, and withholding.
- Undermining includes discounting your opinions, subtly questioning your competence in front of others, or making you feel that your perceptions are wrong. Gaslighting falls here: denying that something happened, downplaying their behavior, or reframing events so you doubt your own memory.
- Limiting involves behaviors that restrict your autonomy or redirect your energy toward the harasser’s needs. Guilt-tripping, violating your boundaries, preventing you from developing your interests or career, and making you feel responsible for the harasser’s emotions are all forms of limiting.
- Withholding takes the form of emotional withdrawal, passive aggression, sulking, refusing to communicate, or showing a deliberate lack of concern. The harasser uses silence and neglect as tools of control.
What makes covert harassment so damaging is that each individual incident can seem trivial. A sarcastic comment here, a cold shoulder there. The person doing it can easily deny intent or claim you’re overreacting. But the pattern is the point. When someone consistently creates insecurity, invades your emotional or physical space, exercises control over your decisions, or underestimates your abilities, those behaviors add up to something that meets any working definition of psychological harassment.
Psychological Harassment in Relationships
In intimate relationships, psychological harassment often takes the form of coercive control. The Mayo Clinic identifies a clear set of patterns: a partner who acts jealous or possessive, tracks your location or online activity, controls your access to money, prevents you from going to work or school, isolates you from family and friends, threatens to keep you from your children, or tries to control whether you can see a healthcare provider.
These behaviors share a common goal: to make one partner dependent on the other and to shrink their world. A partner who monitors your phone, questions every social interaction, and makes you feel guilty for spending time with friends is building a cage, even if they never raise their voice. Gaslighting is especially common in this context. When someone consistently denies your experience of their behavior (“I never said that,” “You’re being too sensitive,” “That didn’t happen”), they’re not just lying. They’re training you to distrust your own perception, which makes it harder to recognize the abuse and harder to leave.
How It Affects Your Health
Psychological harassment causes real, measurable harm to both mental and physical health. When harassment is repeated and sustained, the body’s stress response stays activated. Over time, this chronic stress can raise blood pressure, disrupt sleep, and worsen existing physical conditions.
On the mental health side, prolonged harassment commonly leads to depression, anxiety, and symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder. Clinical observations of mobbing and bullying victims have found that many meet the criteria for PTSD, though there is no separate diagnostic category for harassment-related trauma. In practice, people who seek treatment after sustained psychological harassment are often treated for PTSD, depression, or anxiety disorders.
The health effects don’t always resolve quickly after the harassment stops. People who’ve been psychologically harassed over months or years often carry hypervigilance, difficulty trusting others, and a diminished sense of self-worth long after they’ve left the situation. Encounters tied to identity, such as harassment based on race, gender, or sexual orientation, can be particularly damaging because they attack something fundamental about who you are.
What Employers Are Expected to Do
The ILO’s Convention No. 190 places clear obligations on employers. Member nations that ratify the convention are required to define and prohibit violence and harassment in law, and employers are expected to take specific preventive steps: adopting a workplace policy developed in consultation with workers, incorporating psychosocial risks into occupational safety systems, identifying and assessing harassment hazards, and providing information and training on prevention, protection, and the rights and responsibilities of everyone involved.
In the U.S., federal law doesn’t use the specific term “psychological harassment,” but the EEOC’s framework covers much of the same ground. Conduct that is severe or pervasive enough to create a hostile, intimidating, or offensive work environment can constitute illegal harassment. The key legal threshold is that the behavior must go beyond isolated incidents (unless extremely serious) and must be unwelcome. Documentation matters enormously: if you’re experiencing a pattern of behavior that fits what’s described here, keeping a written record of specific incidents, dates, and any witnesses strengthens your position whether you’re filing an internal complaint or a formal charge.