The strange psychology behind the five types of stalking
When I was a psychiatry trainee more than 30 years ago, I attended several talks by Professor Paul Mullen, a pioneer in the field of stalking.
The message I took away was grim. Stalkers could be dangerous, and often the best anyone could do was help the victim become harder to find. Silent phone number. Private address. In serious cases, move house. Sometimes, move town.
The advice was bleak, in part because stalking-specific laws were only just emerging. Queensland passed Australia's first anti-stalking law in late 1993; the other states followed. Until then, someone could stand outside your house every night for a year, and the police could do little more than politely ask him whether he wouldn't rather be somewhere else.
I was reminded of all this recently at another clinical meeting on stalking. This time, the message was very different. Stalking hasn't become less serious, but we now know far more about why people stalk, which patterns should worry us, and what actually helps.
Perhaps the biggest change: there isn't really one kind of stalker.
There are at least five.
What exactly is stalking?
It’s harder to define than it sounds. A text message isn't stalking. Flowers aren't stalking. Even driving past an ex-partner's house once might be sad or foolish, but it isn't stalking.
Two things matter. The pattern: unwanted, persistent, repeated, intrusive. And the effect: stalking causes fear, or would in any reasonable person. That's the line between annoying and alarming.
It's also common: one in five Australian women and one in fifteen men report having been stalked since age 15. The stereotypical stalker — the sinister stranger behind a tree with binoculars — is largely a Hollywood invention. Stalkers are usually known to their victims.
The methods have modernised too: GPS trackers, spyware, hacked accounts and social media monitoring have joined loitering and phone calls. The tools keep changing, but the engines driving them mostly don't.
Mullen and his colleagues sorted those engines into five broad types. They're not diagnoses — think of them as five pieces of psychological machinery that produce similar behaviour.
1. The rejected stalker
The message: I can't let this relationship end.
Usually this follows the end of an intimate relationship. The stalker may want reconciliation, feel furious about rejection, or oscillate between the two.
Please come back. How could you do this to me? You'll regret this.
One of the stranger insights: stalking can itself become a way of keeping the relationship alive — if someone cannot have love, conflict will at least maintain contact. And sometimes what they can't tolerate losing isn't love at all, but access, influence and control over a former partner.
2. The intimacy seeker
The message: We belong together.
This is closest to the old stereotype of the obviously disturbed stalker. Sometimes there's a psychotic illness or an erotomanic delusion: a fixed conviction that another person secretly loves them. Ordinary events become evidence. She smiled at me because she knows. That song was meant for me.
If you genuinely believe a relationship already exists, being told it doesn't exist achieves very little. Rejection simply gets absorbed into the story.
The few stalkers I've met in my own career mostly belonged here. I never practised forensic psychiatry — to be honest, it frightened me a little — so my cases came through ordinary hospital and outpatient work: patients whose psychosis had quietly fastened onto someone real. What struck me each time was their sincerity. They weren't pretending to believe. They believed.
Intimacy seekers can be among the most persistent, sometimes continuing for years.
3. The resentful stalker
This one may have nothing to do with romance at all.
The message: You wronged me.
The target might be an employer, neighbour, doctor, business or government department. The stalker believes they've been cheated or humiliated and begins a campaign — for acknowledgement, revenge, or simply to make the target suffer.
The grievance becomes self-reinforcing. Friends disappear. Work suffers. Other interests fade. Eventually, the grievance provides what life no longer does: purpose. Which is why resolving the original complaint doesn't always end the behaviour — by then, the grievance is the organising principle of the person's life.
4. The incompetent suitor
The message: If I keep trying, eventually you'll say yes.
Some people are genuinely poor at reading social signals. Others read them perfectly and feel entitled to ignore them.
This type sits uncomfortably close to behaviour our culture has celebrated. Romantic films are full of people refusing to take no for an answer, usually because the scriptwriter has already decided the two characters will fall in love.
Real life doesn't have a scriptwriter. Persistence is only romantic when the attention proves welcome.
The typical pattern here is mercifully brief — days or weeks rather than months. The catch is that it tends to repeat, but with a new person.
5. The predatory stalker
The message: You don't know I'm watching.
The rarest and most disturbing type. The watching isn't the point; it's the preparation. The person learns routines and gathers information, usually ahead of an attack — often finding a sense of power in the unseen act of watching itself.
This is the version that exists in thrillers. Fortunately, it explains very little about stalking in ordinary life.
Same behaviour, different machinery
Imagine someone repeatedly appearing outside another person's workplace. They might be trying to restore a failed relationship. They might believe the person secretly loves them. They might be nursing a grievance, or think persistence is courtship. Or, rarely, they might be learning a routine.
Same behaviour. Completely different machinery.
One thing psychiatry has become better at during my career is asking not just what this person is doing, but what function the behaviour is serving.
It's also why asking whether stalkers are mentally ill doesn't get us far. Some are. Many aren't. Rejection, entitlement, grievance and the need for control can all lead to stalking without any mental illness.
Stalking is a behaviour, not a diagnosis.
When does persistence cross the line?
I still recall a woman I saw for depression, who described an incident that still sticks in my mind. She described being pursued by a man she knew only slightly. He appeared wherever she was. Offered help she hadn't asked for. Left small gifts. Then began turning up at her home.
The people around her told her she was overreacting. He was being nice. Perhaps he was being romantic.
She didn't experience it that way, and she was right not to. It ended in violence. What stayed with me wasn't just the ending — it was how much energy she'd spent doubting herself, because everyone kept translating her fear into his good intentions.
Individual acts can look harmless in isolation. It's the accumulating pattern that matters. And intent doesn't settle the question: I was only being romantic doesn't make persistent unwanted attention romantic.
Romance requires two people. Stalking only requires one.
The victims I've seen in my own practice mostly arrived long afterwards, with anxiety, depression, sometimes full post-traumatic stress disorder. Being watched changes people. Even when, as others unhelpfully point out, "nothing actually happened".
When should we worry more?
Most stalking does not end in serious violence. That's worth knowing.
But the types are not equally risky. Rejected stalkers — ex-partners — are statistically the most dangerous: in the national survey above, half the women stalked by a male intimate partner were also assaulted or threatened by that same partner. Across all types, the warning signs are escalation, explicit threats, previous violence, attempts to get physically close, weapons and heavy intoxication.
Professionals also watch for last-resort thinking: the person who starts saying they've tried everything, nobody will listen, and there's only one thing left to do. It doesn't mean violence is inevitable. It means their perceived options are narrowing.
What should you do?
The five types are really a tool for clinicians and courts, helping determine whether someone needs treatment, a legal sanction, or both. Some stalkers respond to legal consequences; others need treatment, supervision, or a combination of legal control and psychological intervention. Specialist forensic psychiatry services now do exactly that.
If you're on the receiving end, your job isn't to diagnose. If it is safe, and preferably after seeking advice, stating once, clearly, that you want no contact can help establish the boundary. After that, avoid further replies. Keep records, tell someone you trust, and seek advice on the safest next step.
For Australians, the national phone line, 1800RESPECT (1800respect.org.au) has an excellent guide to stalking and monitoring, plus 24-hour counselling and support. In immediate danger, call 000. Similar services exist in most countries.
At the end of that recent clinical meeting, I found myself thinking about the advice we used to give. Change your number. Move house. Disappear. We were, in effect, asking victims to become the hidden ones.
We can do better now. Not perfectly — but better. We understand the machinery. And understanding the machinery is how you finally begin to switch it off.