Stalking wasn’t formally recognized as a distinct behavior for mental health professionals to assess and treat until the 1990s — before that, it was scattered across domestic violence, harassment law, and erotomania literature, with no unified framework of its own.
The three books here effectively built that framework from scratch, and they’re unusually interconnected for a page this size: the same handful of researchers turn up as authors on one book and contributors to another. This means that reading all three gets you several angles on the same core body of work, rather than three unrelated takes.
Two things are worth knowing going in. First, stalking of mental health professionals by their own patients is a real, documented phenomenon, and it gets dedicated treatment in more than one of these books. Second, the field’s most-used classification system for stalkers comes directly from one of these three books and shows up, in some form, in all three.
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The Psychology of Stalking: Clinical and Forensic Perspectives
Edited by J. Reid Meloy, Academic Press, 1998
This was the first scholarly book on stalking ever published. Meloy got nearly every serious researcher then working on the subject to contribute a chapter. The result reads less like one author’s take and morel ike the moment stalking research became a real discipline.
Chapters move from the legal definition of stalking through developmental and social antecedents, psychiatric diagnosis and offender-victim typology, the psychodynamics of stalking, and stalking’s overlap with domestic violence. It closes with a chapter using an early web survey to track erotomania and stalking from historical case material into the then-new territory of online harassment.
One chapter is worth calling out specifically for this site’s audience: “The Stalking of Clinicians by Their Patients,” which treats therapist safety as a distinct clinical topic in its own right.
The book is now over 25 years old, and some of the material is outdated. However, it set a high standard for everything that came after it – including the two books below.
Stalking and Psychosexual Obsession: Psychological Perspectives for Prevention, Policing and Treatment
Edited by Julian Boon and Lorraine Sheridan, Wiley, 2002
This is the broadest of the three books. It deliberately draws contributors from psychology, psychiatry, policing, and law rather than staying inside any one discipline. Paul Mullen and Michele Pathé (authors of the book below) contribute the victim chapter here, and Meloy himself contributes a chapter on stalking and violence.
Beyond that overlap, it covers ground neither of the other two books goes into as directly. This includes a chapter on stalking in children and adolescents, an early and substantial treatment of cyberstalking, and a chapter by security expert Gavin de Becker on the practical work of trying to let a fixated person down without escalating the situation. This book’s closing chapter goes further, into who actually manages the case and how, once a stalker’s been identified.
Recommended for a clinician who needs to coordinate with other agencies on a stalking case, rather than one working purely one-on-one with a client in private practice.
Stalkers and Their Victims
Paul E. Mullen, Michele Pathé, and Rosemary Purcell, Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2009
This is the current definitive reference, and it’s the source of the classification system now used across the field: the rejected stalker, the resentful stalker, the predatory stalker, and intimacy seekers and incompetent suitors. Each type requires a different intervention approach rather than one generic risk assessment.
This second edition substantially expanded the first, adding cyberstalking, stalking in the workplace, female and juvenile stalkers, the stalking of celebrities. It also has a dedicated section on the stalking of health professionals specifically.
All three authors are practicing clinicians, not academics writing from a distance, and each brings a different specialization. Also, the authors are candid about a real gap in the field: stalkers are still treated mainly as subjects for risk assessment rather than as patients who might actually respond to treatment..
Recommended as the primary reference on this page. Start here for the classification system alone, then use the Meloy and Boon/Sheridan books above for the specific chapters (clinician safety, cyberstalking, treatment coordination) that go further than this one does on a given topic.