Thanks, Fungus and much appreciated.
I feel your pain on the "bad neighbours" front. Just a couple of years back, shortly after I had to give up work on account of my own mental health issues - name chronic anxiety, depression and work related burn-out among a number of issues (and which I have previously documented) I found myself in the classic Neighbours-from-Hell scenario.
Some charity or other thought it would be a good idea to parachute a single, teenage mother into a house full of middle-aged men. The landlord, having a social conscience and taking pity on her situation, agreed to this. Although I was not exactly thrilled at the prospect of there a baby in the room beside me - the house is older than God and was built when insulation was an optional extra - I nevertheless accepted the situation as it was. And as I have previously explained, amongst my many quirks, I have serious issues with regard to Noise Intolerance.
But to my pleasant surprise, neither mother nor new-born bairn caused me any significant problems and I hardly heard a peep out of the little mite. Until, that is, the young mother decided to install her truly horrible, weed-addicted teenage boyfriend into the room with them.
There then followed possibly some of the worst months of my life, as I had to endure the regular and seemingly endless screaming matches and rows between these two, seriously fucked-up equivalents of Romeo and Juliet. He, in particular, was a truly nasty piece of work - selfish, brain-dead, aggressive and violent to the core. (I once heard her shouting at him: "Ya hit me! Ya punched me in front of me daughter!" So that will give you an idea as to what an utterly despicable character that this malcontent was).
Anyways, to cut a long and savage story mercifully short, the Landlord gave them their marching orders. But he had to wait some time before the Social Services found somewhere else to house them. (Had it been up to me, I would have had the innocent child given into the care of a decent family, and left her parents to rot in a leaky, one man tent under a roundabout off the M50).
My point is, that there must surely be an onus on these charities and other institutions to (a) provide the necessary support, guidance, and regular ongoing interaction for the people that they are housing to help them adjust, (b) to set out the duty-of-care and responsibility they have towards the other tenants around them, and (c) make it abundantly clear to them, that if they cause serious problems of the kind that the two in question did, they they will be removed post-haste.
From what I could see and witnessed, none of this seems to have been in evidence in this case.
As a look through several of my previous posts on this forum have shown, I have demonstrated great empathy towards some of my fellow boarders who have written of their own mental-health problems. And I will continue to do so. But when someone starts to use those issues - whatever they may be - as an excuse to run roughshod over everyone else around them, and make other people's lives an absolute misery in the process, then that is where I draw the line.
Glad to hear that you survived your own encounter with that situation, Fungus, and thanks again for your support.
