Peer Undermining/Bullying Syndrome; PUBS

A suggestion of a personality disorder for the upcoming DSM-V: PUBS, otherwise known as Peer Undermining/Bullying Syndrome.

Usually suffered by females, this syndrome should be categorised as a personality disorder. A fellow collaborator - RMT - and I have both noticed a cluster of personality traits in other humans and come to the conclusion that it is a subtype of personality, or a personality disorder not yet identified by the wider psychiatric community.

The cluster of symptoms occurs as follows. Generally, the disorder is suffered by females, especially those with lower-than-average physical attractiveness. It is more commonly suffered by females who are attracted to other females.

The primary symptom is an inclination to undermine peers by espousing, on varying levels of subtlety, negative evaluations of said peers to colleagues, family members, friends and authority figures ("dobbing"). These negative evaluations are insinuated into the minds of colleagues without the victim having right of reply, either because the victim does not know they are being undermined, or because the subtlety is so refined as to deny opponents any tangible propositions against which to argue.

The classic example of a sufferer of PUBS is someone with deep insecurities, a need for dominance or pre-eminence, and a tendency to bully. Often sufferers are females who've been convinced during maturation that they are aesthetically displeasing. They are often - but not exclusively - overweight females with homosexual inclinations. In lesbian "butch-femme" dualistic relationships they take the "butch" role; however their sexuality is usually repressed and diverted into destructive power-disparitive relationships with other nominally heterosexual female companions.

PUBS sufferers are often "alpha" females who react to intellectually or emotionally strong males with slights of which the victimised male may or may not be aware. Such alpha males are usually not aware of the threat posed by PUBS sufferers, and so may not even bother to counter the PUBS sufferers' attacks, to their own detriment. Because PUBS sufferers are often lesbians, they are masculinised, feel threatened by, and are envious of, the competence they may encounter in "alpha males", and initiate a struggle for alpha power. However, their struggle is usually covert, denying the victimised male the ability of right of reply unless they possess sophisticated assertive techniques (rare in males who usually polarise to the overtly aggressive or the verbally reticent).