A day in the life of a stalker's victim

I expect that under everyone's serene exterior lie untold secrets. Mine relate to my stalker. Superficially, the humdrum of life continues, with routine largely unruffled. Underneath, however, even though my stalker interferes far less in a physical sense than in previous years, the problem never goes away.

It is now more than four years since I realised that a patient had begun to follow me. While on my list, the patient led me a merry dance of lies and bizarre behaviour. When I finally realised that this saga was all a fabrication and removed the patient from my list, the stalking began. This is where my sense of control left me. How do you apply rational thought to something illogical and unpredictable? Such is mental illness. I can only understand it in the following terms: the stalker had made such an emotional investment in this fantasy world of which I had become a part, that it was too great to be abandoned.

I feel guilty if I need to visit patients near the stalker's address

The questions began early on. What constitutes stalking? Being followed in a car sounds straightforward enough, or was it coincidence? I've given up on the idea of coincidence with this person, but when I have reported the behaviour to the police, frightening episodes have suddenly sounded incredibly mundane and ordinary—hardly a threat and quite possibly coincidence.

“Keep a log,” I was told. My log now reads like the obsessive diary of a sad introspective.

“Was walking outside my house.”

“Was walking by the traffic lights on the school-run route.”

“Was standing at the end of my childminder's road.”

The childminding bit is the one that got me. Dabble with me if you must, but you can leave my kids out of it. This is where anger really crept in and why I remain anxious. The police were very helpful at this stage—there's nothing like a child protection issue to generate an initial response. But police action can be remarkably slow—weeks for an arrest, while my mind was in turmoil.

At this stage, when activity from the stalker was frequent, and I felt goaded into some sort of action and could no longer ignore it, I found myself dipping into the realms of paranoia. I examined every car, studied every number plate, my stomach lurching if I glimpsed an abnormal loping gait. I remembered the phrase “Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.” Often my anxious gaze would find not reassuring strangers, but that face again.

I tried a helpline. I wanted a good kick up the behind, I thought; pull myself together, put things back in perspective. After all, the stalker wasn't even particularly threatening—just notes, silent phone calls, frequent followings, and sightings. Not the stuff of Hollywood. The helpline was laughable. The paranoia from the other end of the line certainly put my anxieties in order—the counsellor was a victim who had suffered considerably more than I had. It was questionable who needed the counselling.

I came away confused but relieved. To interpret the messages I had received as death threats—as the helpline had suggested—would have been absurd. Yet in an odd way, the helpline did give me support. It raised two choices in my mind. I could fall in love with the glamour and intrigue of having a stalker, or I could try much harder to gain perspective, assess the actual risk posed to me and my family (which is probably pretty low), and take control of the endless ruminations in my head.

Practical help was still variable. An injunction would have cost me over £1000 and make little difference. All attempts to get psychiatric help to the patient failed. Although the police were supportive and the Harassment Act of 1997 gives some scope for a legal response, the police were reluctant to take the stalker to court, saying that there was insufficient evidence. However, being arrested modified the stalker's behaviour to some extent. In fact for a few months I even thought the stalking had ended.

But therein lies the problem. It is just as with people with cancer who hope that surgery has cured them—they cannot know for sure. Just as their physical scars remind them of the trauma of surgery, pain in the operation site brings back fear of the disease, and follow up appointments reawaken their and their families' anxieties, so my “ailment” is frequently at the front of my mind. That car! There are cars like that everywhere, and so my number plate checking continues. I feel guilty if I need to visit patients near the stalker's address—am I secretly asking for more trouble? I hesitate to stick to old routines.

Looking back, is there a sense of winning or losing? Perhaps winning, in as far as my faith in patients has not really altered. Bizarre stories (common in my line of work) do not make me assume the patient is mad or manipulative. I realise that uncertainty is here to stay—should I ignore the current low key intrusions or should I come down on them like a ton of bricks? I just don't know and so do nothing.