The Manipulator

May exploit family, workplace or social club relationships, manipulating others with guilt and distorting perceptions. While there may be no physical harm involved, people are affected with emotional injury. Vulnerable family members are common targets. A common attention-seeking ploy is to claim he or she is being persecuted, victimised, excluded, isolated or ignored by another family member or group, perhaps insisting she is the target of a campaign of exclusion or harassment.

This pattern can be found in different contexts although where the alleged aggressor is the government / police / mental health service providers, or indeed "everyone", the person may be suffering from paranoid delusions. For the sake of this article on attention seeking, the attention-seeking manipulator can be presumed to not actually believe the claims of persecution they make, unlike the delusional person who sincerely and steadfastly believes them.