"When I stood up to him and told him that I would not tolerate that kind of behavior, he became very docile and sweet and asked me to sit down and said, 'We can work this out,'" said Mangan. "He later told the board that I was screaming and throwing things across the room."

Mangan also said her supervisor once asked her to set up a meeting with the parents of an athlete and instructed her to be there. He later told the school board that she walked into the room uninvited, she explained. Other types of harassment Mangan endured by her supervisor included written reprimands and negative employee evaluations.

"He was spreading rumors about me, telling the board that I didn't do things that he asked me to do," she said.

The bullying and harassment continued until she lost her job in 2004, when she was denied tenure by the local school board. During the time she was bullied, she received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and suffered severe depression.

Most people who suffer from workplace harassment and bullying suffer from emotional problems because they tolerate the abusive behavior rather than take action to stop it for fear of losing their jobs, said Tom Witt, a volunteer and New York City coordinator for the New York Healthy Workplace Advocates. In the end, the targeted employees are either fired or quit as a result of the bullying and harassment.

"They do their best to try to please that person who's not happy with them and who's actually just really bullying them," explained Witt. "It takes a long time before people realize the concept that there are these aggressive-type people out there and you're a target, and they're never happy unless there's somebody that they're bullying."

According to the New York Healthy Workplace Advocates website, more than 1.4 million New York employees are the victims of bullying. In addition, harassment and bullying in the workplace is legal unless the target is a member of a protected group — based on race, ethnicity, sex or disability — under civil rights legislation, said Witt. Verbal and psychological abuse is legal in the workplace, he added

An informal study conducted in 2003 by psychologist Gary Namie, who set up the Workplace Bullying Institute, stated that 76 percent of the people who experience bullying at work suffer from anxiety, stress and excessive worry. In addition, 39 percent of respondents said they had received diagnoses of depression as a result of workplace harassment.