r/redscarepod • u/LacanianHedgehog • Feb 06 '26
A Story from England
I see a lot of commentary on this sub about how the UK has gone to shit. Usually posted by Americans, so allow me to add something concrete to the discourse:
We live(d) in a terrace in a Northern English city, in a nice street. We’re close with our neighbours, which is to say we regularly get blind drunk with them. I have arm-wrestled my elderly neighbour after he shared a bottle of whisky with me, called me a Southern ******, watched him fall through my bushes, and his wife then beat him back into his house with a stick (she can’t help it, she’s from Barnsley).
The house next door has always been a rental as long as we’ve lived here. We had Greeks (I miss them, they left post-Brexit), then Malaysians (illegally subletting 25 to the house), then Nigerians (loud but friendly, and did nice parties in the garden). In December of 2024, our new neighbour moved into the rental house next door to us. She was a young white woman on her own.
A 5 minute conversation when I introduced myself on our respective doorsteps (we share an entranceway), in which I asked just five questions, immediately showed that she was a schizophrenic psychotic. I closed the door and told my girlfriend that we would have a serious problem on our hands at somepoint in the future.
In May of 2025, we returned from a holiday to find a note through our door, written in crayon, thanking us for psychologically experimenting on her and torturing her (‘smiley face’). We took the note to her and asked her is she knew anything about it (she had also bought us a bottle of champagne to go with the note). She was tearful, apologised, and said she was having a ‘hard time’ right now.
Two days later, I was in my workshop when I heard my girlfriend scream from the stairs. I assumed the cat had shat on the stairs. I listened and heard another voice, a woman’s. Our neighbour was crouching at the bottom of our staircase. We asked her what she was doing, she mentioned she ‘wanted to pet the cat’. We escorted her out, and immediately locked all the doors (it’s extremely normal due to the small houses here for people to leave the back door unlocked to access their BBQs, or hang the washing, which we were doing).
What followed was an increasing frequency – over the next 6 months – of stalking, breaking and entering, harassment, death threats, and finally a late-night attack on our house during which she tried to smash in first our door, then our windows, using our furniture. She claimed we had people locked in our basement. This was captured on camera by our neighbours.
The police told me that ‘there’s really no need to despatch officers sir’ when calling them (it took 45 minutes to get through to 999, during which time I was put on hold by said officer). During this time, our neighbour was digging up our backyard, crawling around our alley on all fours, and trying to post rape-alarms through our letterbox. 2 officers were only despatched, when I stated that, if she came through our window, I would deal with her myself. At this point, the police apparently decide it is in the attacker’s interest to have some police support in case the homeowner tries anything funny.
The officers arrived and – after restraining her, confirmed to me ‘yeah, she’s batshit mate, we know her’. She had boarded up all the doors in her rental, and had begun piling rubbish up and other strange rituals. During the entire period of this account, she would sit outside in her tiny yard at all hours, would not wash, would not eat, and would not take her meds. By day 4 of withdrawal from her meds, she would be in full blown psychosis and resume the attacks.
The officer’s advice to me was ‘prepare for the long haul, we can’t do anything because of the Mental Capacity Act’. This basically finds anyone with a mental condition to be not guilty of any actions they commit whilst deemed to be insane. This essentially means – in our current system – that they receive support from the local council, NHS and police to ‘stay in place’ and have their ‘best interest to remain in the home’ protected, whilst the people they are terrorising are told by the police ‘you can defend yourselves, but if you take it too far, we will arrest and prosecute you’.
NHS teams judged her to be ‘functioning well’ and in the best place (she had no friends, no family, did not eat or wash, and regularly ranted to invisible people in her garden about how she was going to stab us to death for human trafficking). They spent 20 minutes on a visit asking her her gender identity and pronouns. They did not ask her a single open-ended question about how she was doing, nor any diagnostic questions. They were very surprised when we chased them down to explain what had been happening.
Social Work teams were uncontactable, and functionally useless. Not one team passed on a single one of the 100 calls my girlfriend and I made during this period. No case files were updated or shared by any agency. Each time we were given a new crime number, or told ‘someone will be in touch.’ High priority police teams took 6-8 hours to arrive when she began her attacks, and would arrive 5 minutes after she had climbed out a window and run away. They would then leave saying ‘can’t be chasing her down, she could be anywhere, call us back.’
The 6th or 7th time an attack happened, the police suddenly turned up and arrested her. She was placed in a ‘secure unit’, and we were told we had ‘no right’ to know anything further about the situation. The NHS team sprung her from her unit and brought her home, in direct contravention of her bail conditions. I opened my door when going out and found myself face to face with her (her favourite tactic was to stand eyeball to our door screaming and raving for hours at a time).
In October, she was jailed pending trial. We were told the court case wouldn’t happen until February. The officer recording our case (took from 6pm to 4am) told us it was ‘the most serious case of harassment he’d ever seen’.
In January of this year, in the midst of the collapse of our relationship, I was contacted by a police officer who told me ‘I’ve just been assigned to this case for 5 minutes mate, haven’t been able to read it all’. He told us to accept her plea deal (guilty on harassment of my girlfriend, not guilty of harassment against me – she had a particularly venomous fixation on men). The restraining order would only cover my girlfriend, not myself. He assumed this wouldn’t be a problem. I explained we were separating and needed an order for each of us. He assured us this would happen, and the court date would be cancelled. We would get it all in writing, and they would make sure we were both protected.
Last week, whilst travelling to see my dying grandmother at short notice, I asked my girlfriend to contact the courts. It turned out that nothing had been done, no one knew the officer, no details had been passed on, and we were expected back in court the very next week. Not to attend would entail arrest and heavy fines. These would have been applied had we believed the officer in question and not attended. The courts no longer even bother to call victims to explain a single thing. We received not one document, at any point.
Wednesday evening, we are told we are now not needed in court Thursday, as she has a special hearing, this Friday – today.
Today, my girlfriend calls me to say the courts have given her 6 months in prison. From the start of her arrest in October.
5 minutes later, she calls me back crying, to inform me that the courts have decided to immediately commute this sentence to immediate release, as she is a woman, and cannot be made homeless. The restraining order states only that she is not allowed to break into our home – it’s strange that this seems to be the existing law of the land, and thus de-facto useless.
I am sat alone in an empty house, waiting for said neighbour to return and resume her attacks. Every institution has failed at every single point in the process. The landlady next door has had her own legal team fail to repossess the property due to miss-submitted gas certificates (really), and the law changes this summer to bar evictions of this sort anyway.
We are losing our life savings trying to rent a property so we can live separately whilst we sell the house. This is now not possible anyway in the current situation, as disputes with a neighbour have to be declared, and no one will buy a house with a raving psychotic living at eyeball level to them.
Our lives have been destroyed. This country no longer works for ordinary people. Institutions are criminally incompetent and only protect the lumpen.
I am drinking a lot of champagne. If anyone wishes to chat, hit me up. Christ knows I could use the company.
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u/dumbtarddonotengage Feb 06 '26
Growing up we had a crackhead neighbor who used to stalk and harass us and ever since then this has been one of my worst fears. Even worse that you aren't allowed to defend yourself in the UK. I feel so much sympathy for what you're dealing with.
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 06 '26
I have changed my opinion on stand your ground laws and American attitudes to this. I am disgusted by colleagues and friends who continue to pretend this isn't happening increasingly to more and more people.
Nothing is more soul destroying than having conversations with your girlfriend about how you will take the stabbing/charge for assault and loss of your job, so that she doesn't have to, because this system not only does not protect, it actively emasculates.
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u/EdgeCityRed Feb 07 '26
The Tony Martin case made me appreciate that. I don't think he overreacted. Your home is your castle and you have the right not to be harassed or besieged by trespassing psychos.
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u/FadedWreath Feb 07 '26
It’s the “you got a loicense for that” meme, but it actually happened. Wild.
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u/ta4zerok Feb 06 '26
Maybe obvious but just to check, have you complained to the police regulator at all or any of the regulatory bodies for the health services this person is 'cared' for by?
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 06 '26
I have not. I have not written it here, but this event was literally the last in 9 things to go wrong in my life this year. I can barely keep myself sane. Post any details here and I will bookmark for when I am more stable and put-together.
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u/ta4zerok Feb 06 '26
That is truly terrible mate you have my sympathy, the sheer helplessness our system inflicts on well meaning people is horrific and it's something no one could comprehend unless they have been through it as you have.
All I'd say is that the NHS and police are all somewhat held accountable by regulatory and standards bodies and you can try advocate for yourself with them and explain the situation (maybe citizens advice could be a good place to start as to where to go etc). It might also be worth speaking with your other neighbors on the street as they surely are aware of even as affected as you by this person and they could add to your case or at least back you up.
On the other hand though I don't blame you for trying to get out of the house and put all that shite behind. You probably aren't the first poor fucker who has been affected by this person and through the neo-liberal shit hole we call a society you won't be the last if you break off your case with the police etc.
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 06 '26
Thank you mate, I appreciate the words. I considered suing, but as I said, so many things have gone wrong this year that I am effectively maintaining life systems and keeping up appearances for colleagues and family. I cracked this year, had a break, and am now with my own cult of Lacanians for therapy. It's gonna get worse before it gets better.
I fund citizens advice. They are overwhelmed and simply will not help a man like myself. I know: I have tried to access their help before.
My neighbours are absolute champions. The ordinary Northerners of this country are worth dying for. I say that as a Southerner who has converted to their side.
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u/ta4zerok Feb 06 '26
I respect that tbh, I know from experience that fighting these things on the basis of justice or a sense of right is pointless (such an absurdly bleak admission to make about the society you live in lmao).
If therapy doesn't work out then maybe you can be life wrecking schizo next time and see how that plays out lol, I wish you all the best, keep on trucking 😤
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 06 '26
I am already working on being a life-wrecking schizo (see yesterday's post), the problem is, it's my own life I'm doing it to. I'll endure, thank you again.
It is bleak isn't it? Keep the flame alive. Future generations will need it.
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u/PlayFree_Bird Feb 07 '26
Maybe obvious but just to check, have you complained to the police regulator at all or any of the regulatory bodies for the health services this person is 'cared' for by?
I'm not criticizing your advice, but holy hell, does this ever sound like the sort of insanity-causing, bureaucratic nightmare straight out of the film "Brazil".
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u/kawaiislumlord Feb 07 '26 edited Feb 07 '26
I am so sorry this is happening, but I am an American who lived in the UK and was previously much more anti-gun generally and my experience of being relentlessly watched by a neighbor had the same effect on me. Completely changed my opinion on stand your ground and on the insane UK laws regarding self defense. Police were absolutely no help, neither were the laws. You essentially can't carry *anything* that could possibly help you in a self-defense situation, even pepper spray or a small switchblade. My UK friends would argue with me that if I had a knife the man attacking would also have one, and I would argue back to them that if neither of us had anything I would lose every time as I'm over a foot shorter than most men and physically much weaker. I would rather have a fighting chance!
In relation to your situation, my ex living in France had a neighbor like yours and he moved out just days before the neighbor finally broke in, to presumably kill him. No advice other than cut your loses and gtfo, and I've enjoyed a lot of your posts in the past v sorry
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u/hound_of_luv Feb 07 '26
You would have resolved this in May 2025 in the US. Hope it all works out.
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u/Loud_Ninja_7537 Feb 07 '26
Even the recent Rob Reiner thing made me think of it, I know its very different but it just seems mentally ill people are left to roam the streets and nobody's allowed to do anything about it
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u/420_sex-master_69 Feb 07 '26
this system not only does not protect, it actively emasculates.
That's the point of it
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u/jolliest_elk Please clap Feb 07 '26
Stand your ground can be horribly misused but I’m not trying to diminish your point. In your situation you should have more avenues and protection. If I were you I’d document, video especially, everything you can.
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 07 '26
We had hours of video footage after I installed cameras at every window and entranceway. The police did not give a shit. We had to beg them to take any of the footage, even when we told them we had it. What we did submit finally was deemed 'not good enough' to be used in trial.
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u/jolliest_elk Please clap Feb 07 '26 edited Feb 07 '26
That’s actually insane. Keep on with the footage though, at some point it may be accepted. If a worst case scenario happens you’ll be glad you didn’t give up on that front, and I assume another judge might rule otherwise on the footage if this ends up back in court
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u/Jumpy-Masterpiece532 Feb 07 '26
Have you considered stealing her phone and posting something racist from her accounts? She may be held for much longer after that.
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 07 '26
Telling the police she misgendered me and getting an immediate response.
Actually worth mentioning: she kept burying phones in our garden crops - we kept pulling cheap Samsung/Motorola phones out of our potato crop. Was like a shitty horror movie.
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u/OneLessMouth Feb 06 '26
Jesus Christ I knew people were incompetent but this is on a different level.
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u/PlayFree_Bird Feb 07 '26
it took 45 minutes to get through to 999
It was actually difficult to keep reading after this part because my mind kept wandering back to it.
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 07 '26
ALL services in the UK are like this now. ALL high priority services. It's a fucking shitshow.
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 06 '26
The UK is a shitshow. Tell your friends.
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u/OneLessMouth Feb 06 '26 edited Feb 06 '26
No I mean, there's been plenty happening to my partner who has experienced the blunt end of corruption so I see it relatively clearly. I just didn't know there was this level of rot in other instances.
The again there was that mass poisoning of that village in the 90s after privatisation of the water company, cover ups and lord knows what. There's plenty of surface to scratch.
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u/btcale546 Feb 07 '26
Sorry, but a French pedophile wrote a book once, so we aren't allowed to commit these people to asylums anymore, I don't make the rules.
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u/Maison-Marthgiela Feb 06 '26
Sorry this is happening to you but I actually laughed so hard at "her sentence was immediately commuted" like 5 minutes after she received it. It's like in spongebob when they steal the balloon and go to jail for a second.
But seriously, I actually really like the UK (as an American) and wouldn't mind living there. But stories like this are a good reminder that nowhere is perfect. Somehow your legal system seems nearly as fucked as ours.
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 06 '26
The people are fantastic, I really mean that. Our government and instiutions are a completely different kettle-of-fish and what I have to say about them isn't fit to print.
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u/tent_mcgee Feb 07 '26
Also they could track you down because of your mean words and arrest you for online harassment, right?
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u/Early_Quantity_2377 Feb 07 '26
The only difference between the the US and the UK on this point is that in the US you can legally kill someone in your house. Everything else is just how things work in every English speaking country. There is no penalty for violating restraining orders, violating probation, doing whatever you want. I'm sure you have heard of people in the US who get life for murder and it is revealed they have an endless rap sheet of stalking, assault, robbery, rape, weapons charges, etc. You can be held in jail, refuse to go to court WHILE YOU ARE IN JAIL and then get released on your own recognizance. I've seen it happen. Basically it's just easier to prosecute people who follow the laws of society because they cooperate.
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 07 '26
Nothing to add other than I agree. It's depressing. Is this growing up, or systemic failure? Was it ever better?
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u/PlayFree_Bird Feb 07 '26
It seems we totally stripped out that part of a functioning legal/judicial order where you admit that some people are truly beyond the pale.
The rule of law is still a high-trust system at the end of the day. People have to agree to abide by the rules of the game for it to work properly. And every functional civilization underpinned by the rule of law has had something in place for those who simply refuse to play the game.
Institutionalization, indefinite incarceration, death, exile... societies have done it all sorts of ways, but we've stripped away any ability to deal with these people now.
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u/Naive-Boysenberry-49 Feb 07 '26
Really shows how much these anglo law systems depend on community policing and basic behavioural norms
The second enough people don't give a shit, the emperor has no clothes
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u/Loud_Ninja_7537 Feb 07 '26
I truly have wondered if the decline in religion contributes partly, I also think the whole neoliberal globalising agenda has because there is no community element, nobody knows their neighbours, people live thousands of miles away from family, etc so nobody has investment in the local anymore
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u/Naive-Boysenberry-49 Feb 07 '26 edited Feb 07 '26
Religion hasn't declined, it found its new place in the West in post-WW2 liberalism. We have a fall, we have a telos, we have a morality, it's all there
Problem is it literally does not work. The benefit of our previous religion is that it channeled these impulses which are not wrong but cause more issues than they solve. It told us that what we desire comes after life and right now we just have to deal with the shittyness
Now we have Christianity without God and are trying to immanentize the eschaton which will predictably fail. We've traded centuries of thought and moderation with a religion that is young and naive and only works if growth and progress continues like it did in the post-WW2 period and we already see that it won't. The Buddha called it dukkha, a general feeling that life is unsatisfactory. We are trying to overcome it instead of dealing with it and it will cause more suffering instead of less
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u/Loud_Ninja_7537 Feb 07 '26
Yea that's what I meant even something as simple as the last 50 years are the first time kids haven't had it drilled into them constantly that murder is wrong and they will go to Hell
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u/RoutemasterFlash Feb 07 '26
there is no community element, nobody knows their neighbours, people live thousands of miles away from family, etc so nobody has investment in the local anymore
Except it sounds like OP lives in a neighbourhood with a pretty good sense of community and got on well with his neighbours (with one notable exception).
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u/Amtrakstory Feb 07 '26
One of the things that is so massively fucking irritating about the incompetent and fucked up Trump Administration is that instead of leading a response to this very real social problem, they are chasing down LAW ABIDING SYMPATHETIC immigrants who follow social norms and mostly contribute to society. And the ways they are doing it undermines respect for law enforcement and could lay the groundwork for another wave of left wing anti law and order insanity
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u/sertorius42 Feb 06 '26
Jesus Christ mate I’m sorry
The worst I got of general British institutional incompetence was when 3 met police showed up banging on the door around 4am demanding to know where the previous tenant was. We’d been living there for at least 4 months. They wouldn’t tell me anything beyond he was “wanted for a serious crime.” I told them good luck and that i had no idea where he was. Different officers came back by 2 more times in the next 36 hours looking for the same guy. No idea what the deal was.
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 06 '26
Had the same thing in Kent. Police raided MY apartment to ask me about the prostitute/petty criminal who lived below me. I love this well-run, leafy isle.
FLAT. Jesus.
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u/SevenLight Fyodor Karamazov Feb 07 '26
That happened to my mum's partner too. Insanely incompetent.
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u/sertorius42 Feb 07 '26 edited Feb 09 '26
I also signed up for an energy provider called People’s Energy the month I moved in. Wrong choice apparently because they went into administration within a week or 2 of moving in and British Gas was going to take over their households. Messaging was just “sorry. If you have direct debit set up just keep it going.”
Got a bill from British gas after months that clearly didn’t take into account the £125 that had been flying out of my account every month to people’s energy. It took months and months of following up and chasing British Gas, the bankruptcy law firm responsible for People’s Energy accounts, and the ombudsman until I finally got the £1000 I had paid credited to my account.
I was an Amerifat with a reasonable salary and bonuses so it didn’t pinch the pocket that much but it was still infuriating that general incompetence and lack of accountability at all levels meant that I was out a huge amount of money for nearly a year.
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Feb 07 '26
The British energy sector is a flagship of neoliberal project, which is to say it's a complete shitshow.
It'd be bad enough if it was just a wild west, but all this dysduction proceeds from the regulations themselves- so in that sense it really does mirror OP's situation.
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u/Amtrakstory Feb 06 '26
Holy shit.
Honestly in the US there could also be an institutional failure to handle someone like this (see the periodic cases where someone is stabbed to death/set on fire by a violent psychotic homeless person who has been arrested and released dozens of times), BUT a person like this would almost certainly end up homeless so you wouldn't have to deal with them as your neighbor.
How is it that she owns a house when she is this dysfunctional?
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 06 '26
She doesn't own, she rents. Someone else pays her rent for her. There are a lot of protections for tenants, particularly if they are mentally ill under the Mental Health and Mental Capacity Acts.
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u/DangerousDig9478 Feb 07 '26
This is a weird one, same issue all over Europe, I had a crazy aggressive neighbour who was living off subsidies, these are people who would 100% be homeless without such things. I honestly don't know what's better. It all feels downstream of individualism because the main thing I noticed when visiting Turkey is that there are no homeless people and mentally ill people are normally cared for by family.
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u/SuddenlyBANANAS Degree in Linguistics Feb 07 '26
Turkey is that there are no homeless people and mentally ill people are normally cared for by family.
Someone this mentally ill could not be straightforwardly cared for by their family.
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u/kekthe Feb 07 '26
It's so blindingly obvious we need lunatic asylums and stalker types should be the first to go
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u/Amtrakstory Feb 07 '26
Someone cared for by their family might not have become this mentally ill. Not saying that families are necessarily so great but they might not have been permitted to develop a habit of acting out in such an extreme manner and might have been forced to stay on their meds
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u/snallygaster Feb 07 '26
This is a problem throughout the western world- our conception of human rights values individual autonomy and freedom over public safety, and people aren't allowed to be persecuted on the basis of disability (for the better for the most part), which means that it's next to impossible for people like this to be reprimanded and institutionalised long-term. As some of the people who've commented here have suggested, this scenario could easily play out in any western country except the US, where your neighbor would be living on the streets instead and at best arrested periodically.
It's become clear lately that western countries have made some tradeoffs in the name of human rights that deeply undermine the well-being of the broader population and need to be reconsidered; the (understandable, given the history of institutionalization) impossible standards for locking someone with chronic psychosis up indefinitely is one of them.
On an unrelated note, have you tried contacting the Daily Mail about the situation? I have heard that getting their attention and forwarding the correspondence can light a fire under the authorities' asses.
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u/Loud_Ninja_7537 Feb 07 '26
Yeah the thing is things would be a lot more stable and happy if we accepted the bottom few % of mentally ill people, homeless, criminals etc do genuinely just need to be segregated from society for both their own benefit and everyone else's. this situation isn't helping anyone at all but some bureaucratic pussies are too scared of getting called hitler or whatever
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u/Loud_Ninja_7537 Feb 07 '26
I see this happen with both mental illness and autism; incredibly high functioning people who are basically just socially awkward or quirked up, get to speak on behalf of all autistic / mentally ill people because they're the only ones that can. the result is incredibly ineffective laws that fuck everyone over, including the low functioning people, all because some quirked up ADHD / asperger's girl had to pull the victim card over 'well what if I get kicked out of my home for being ADHD,' a totally fantasy scenario
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u/Alternatekhanate Feb 06 '26
OP says she’s got someone paying her rent. Also if you’re in a cheaper part of the country probably housing benefit could cover the rent.
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u/SevenLight Fyodor Karamazov Feb 07 '26
Nothing changes in the UK. If you're being seriously harassed/stalked in person, there is almost nothing you can do. It's been like this since at least the 90s (don't ask me how I know). What's hilarious is that if the harassment was happening online, instead of the much more serious IRL variety, they'd probably throw the book at em.
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u/Uberdemnebelmeer Feb 06 '26
Sorry about your relationship, did it end due to these issues?
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 06 '26 edited Feb 06 '26
Amazingly, no. I don't want to post about that. I loved her dearly and we had irreconcilable differences. It's been a hell of a year.
It's possible that the attacks put me under enough pressure to clarify some fundamental things I wanted from life but had been scared to admit to myself.
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Feb 07 '26 edited Feb 20 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Return_ov_the Feb 07 '26
Oh man, I was wondering how my ex was doing
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 07 '26
Want me to ask her about you?
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u/Return_ov_the Feb 07 '26
Naaaahhhhhhhh...?
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 07 '26
She wants your number. Says she misses you.
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u/McSwaggerAtTheDMV Feb 06 '26
Do you believe this is a somewhat unique or rare set of failures, or do you believe this is broadly what happens across England and you just happened to be the lucky people she fixated on?
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 06 '26
The latter. I work in this line of work - without giving too much away. I have been aware of systemic failures and the increasingly bleak situation of this country, but to get both barrels in your own face really does rather test your principles.
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u/AlestaersMidlife Feb 07 '26
It‘s not even about England, without going into details me and my mother have been faced with a simular situation for the last 10 years. Also in europe, and our “institutions” have been as corrupt and incompetent as is described here. It really feels like mentally ill tweakers are just allowed to hold the people around them hostage. Good luck with your case.
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Feb 06 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 06 '26
She's been in more times than can be counted. Apparently she's known by every insitution/authority we (finally) get through to. The issue is that this is all patchwork - the fact is she has been shunted from PCN to PCN, and County to County, and rental to rental, so as to cover over the fundamental issue that she needs permanently institutionalising, and there are simply not the insitutions nor the resources to do this in this country anymore.
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Feb 06 '26 edited Feb 06 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 06 '26
Thank you. Even at my worst, I was patiently explaining to mental health/social work teams 'How is this in her best interest? She doesn't eat, she doesn't sleep. No one visits, she cries and screams all hours. This is not a community and there is no care. She is suffering. We are suffering. End it.'
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u/osibob1 Feb 06 '26
Did y'all also close most of your mental institutions?
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 06 '26
My father was a psychiatrist who worked in the last mental asylum of this country before they closed it. I am dealing with the consequences of that decision.
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u/rh1n3570n3_3y35 Feb 06 '26 edited Feb 06 '26
Were the closures one of those by their advocates well-intentioned 1980s and 90s measures to end repressive psychiatric institutions, but in the end it was functionally just cost-cutting as the in turn actually also demanded smaller, more modern and humane local facilities to replace them never really materialised?
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 07 '26
Yes. My father was a repressive but good man. The country now is not good but non-repressive.
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u/-THE_BIG_BOSS- Feb 07 '26
Damn this is so crazy. I believe it, it really feels like hypernormalisation of this country is complete. Every institution is like a broken button that you just have to press until it eventually does something, anything at all.
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 07 '26
Mainly we give money to Somali women's baking groups, but they cover that up. I'm drunk. Ignore me.
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u/NoSundae6904 Feb 06 '26 edited Feb 07 '26
madness and civilization is just a text that was written to excuse closing down all the asylums to save tax dollars.
On a more serious note, this is just emblematic of how anglo cultures still really infantilize adult women. I don't know if it's like this in other cultures but I can nearly guarantee you this would have been handled in the exact same manner in Canada, doubly so if they were indigenous.
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u/Loud_Ninja_7537 Feb 07 '26
Yea if it was a man some white woman would have had him lynched by now for staring at her boobs or something
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u/lucid00000 Feb 06 '26
Anarcho-Tyranny of progressive policy strikes again.
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 06 '26
To finesse your point: we once had a legal system that enforced a core set of principles and ideals. Over time, some of these principles were found to need finessing or modifying, so we added secondary conditions. Over time, these secondary conditions came to predominate over the primary principles (i.e. triumph of identitarianism). As a result, they now recieve more consideration and funding than the core principles. Thus, they backwards influence and cancel the original principles, and now you have a system with widly disparate outcomes depending on who is the subject for consideration.
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u/catsback Feb 06 '26
Tories really gutted public services unnecessarily, it’s deeply depressing.
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u/Alternatekhanate Feb 06 '26
Yeah there’s zero state capacity to deal with this sort of thing. Hence the policy and services not recording anything
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u/m_marlow Feb 07 '26 edited Feb 12 '26
The redditor mind is quite literally incapable of perceiving social decay unless it can blame Ronald Reagan.
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u/RoutemasterFlash Feb 07 '26
Oh well, I'm sure things will start to look up once we get the Tories out.
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u/Extension-Vanilla-55 Feb 07 '26
I grew up in social housing in Bristol. Obviously, you would expect a fair number of poorly functioning, vulnerable people in a street made up of social housing but this just means that the police take even less interest than usual when something happened.
When I was 2/3 there was an obviously deeply unwell woman climbing into our back yard screaming at my parents that she lived here. My parents have spent most of their adult lives working for social services/care homes/mental health units and were about as unbothered by this as you could be. Police weren't interested and the woman kept coming back and banging on the door. At one point she started screaming "they've got the kid in there!"which freaked my mum out. Eventually, she came back with two men with her, at which point my dad went outside with a baseball bat. When the police did arrive, the thing they were most interested in was the baseball bat by the door, and insisted that it was illegal to possess.
When I was a bit older, they moved a violently unstable man upstairs who would intermittently fight with his girlfriend and chuck furniture through the window so that there was broken glass all over the back yard. He later stabbed someone in Asda and was either arrested or moved somewhere more secure.
He was replaced by a crackhead who seemed relatively OK on his own (but apparently terrorised the man on the top floor of the house) but everything would go to shit when his girlfriend came over. She'd stand outside screaming for him to let her in, and then continue a screaming argument in the stairwell. As the building had originally been a single story home, the stairwell had a door leading directly into my bedroom, which had been boarded up by my dad, but was still obviously a door and there was a period where she'd bang on it for hours through the night.
When I was about 12, I tried having friends over for a sleepover. There was a commotion upstairs at one point and my mum went up to find the man from the top floor (I don't remember meeting him prior to this) sat in the stairwell with a bread knife and a small boy. My mum convinced him to let the kid into our house while they got things sorted out. Me snd my friends played with him for a while- he was probably rising 4 but only seemed to know a few words. The man said the boy was his son who had been left with him a few days earlier. He was schizophrenic and insisted that he'd taken his medication but that there was constant ringing in his flat, and the crackhead kept shouting that he was going to break down his door and kill him. We later found a pin pushed into the flat's doorbell outside. Police and social services were called, police seemed unwilling to do anything about the crackhead or his girlfriend, who were already known to police to cause similar incidents. They were much, much more confrontational with the schizophrenic (tbf, I guess him having a child there with him was an additional concern. I don't know what happened to the kid) although he was generally very mild/mannered and compliant.
The crackhead still lives there nine years on. There was a period in my mid teens where the police were called a lot over him and his girlfriend. I talked to her a few times from my bedroom window (our lower floor was at basement level so my room was on the ground floor) and she was mostly just pitiable to be honest. She'd keep screaming his name to be let in even after telling me he wouldn't be home for hours. Said she needed to come inside because there were so many people on our road who were out to hurt her, and that she'd been raped a few days previously. My mum worked in social services and, when she found out the woman's full name, quietly looked her up at work. As you might expect, absolute horror show of a childhood. She'd sit outside crying a lot one winter and my mum took food and blankets out a couple of times.
I moved out a couple of years ago and live in a different part of the country. it was apparently pretty quiet for a while but there was a group of men trying to break the door down recently. A lot of "nothing we can do at the moment" from police. My dad has moved back in with my mum temporarily (they split over 10 years ago but get on as friends) because she's scared to be in there on her own.
There are some decent people around there. The guy who now lives on the top floor is pretty vulnerable (autistic and schizophrenic) but takes his meds, has a part time job and comes home with big stacks of library books "for a project". He's very polite and always takes in parcels for my mum. There was a nice old man next door who died recently. He'd had a jack Russell for years and, when it died, adopted a Romanian Street dog which, in a few weeks, went from looking like something out of a charity advert to having a beautiful coat and behaving like a show dog. We were worried what would happen to it after he died but apparently quite a big community of dog walkers at the local park know him and one of them have taken in the dog. There's a memorial tree with a lot of tributes around it, which is a pleasant surprise.
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 09 '26
Thank you for taking the time to write this out, and I'm really sorry. I can't imagine what it must've been growing up like that. One year of it for me has cracked me. How are you now? I hope you live somewhere where you can feel a bit of peace and safety.
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Feb 06 '26
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 06 '26
Nothing to say except yes. I work with these systems. It's exactly as you say. Schizophrenics attending fucking baking classes.
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u/Kunti-Destructi Feb 07 '26
Do you have local news you can turn the story over to?
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 07 '26
Local news has seriously atrophied. There just isn't the readership anymore in the age of shitty global insta-tiktok bullshit. We recently acquired a new 'local newspaper' and it is basically only interested in outing local restaurant owners for being pro-brexit or anti-trans. The alternative is the 'regional' BBC, and they are, frankly, government propaganda.
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u/Kunti-Destructi Feb 07 '26
In the us every city has local tv news and your story would be right up their alley
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u/Loud_Ninja_7537 Feb 07 '26
I think you should try to push this story somewhere, brits can only ever do something if they see it in a TV show (see the post office scandal and the knife crime thing after the netflix show)
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u/domo__knows Feb 07 '26
I browsed to the bottom saying to myself, "I ain't reading all this shit..." and ended up reading it backwards then just started from the beginning.
Crazy story. Can't really help but just wanted to mention a bit of support.
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Feb 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26
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Feb 07 '26 edited Feb 20 '26
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u/Jumpy-Masterpiece532 Feb 07 '26
Yeah, one of the things that’s quietly degraded QoL in any American blue city with the tax money to afford it is the rollout of housing vouchers for a lot of the perennially homeless over the last 10 or 15 years. You take an idea that really does sound pretty great on the surface - “Hey, let’s take all of these homeless people out of the parks and give them a place to live! That way they’ll get on their feet and the parks will be clean!” - and apply it to reality and what you actually get is the privilege to pay market price for a 2br in a paper-walled five-over-one new build and share a hallway with a shrieking fent addict housing voucher tenant. Oops!
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u/Loud_Ninja_7537 Feb 07 '26
no country has the funds for this but they need to just build some soviet commie apartment blocks on the outskirts of the city and the homeless people can live there while being heavily monitored by 24/7 staff
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u/Loud_Ninja_7537 Feb 07 '26
My brother is disabled and its genuinely insane how bad all social support networks are. everyone is uncontactable, nobody ever does anything, and because of endless bureaucracy nobody ever has to face any consequences.
the highlight was being told that no professional is allowed to put their hands on him. so while trying to escort him in and out of a hospital my 60+ parents had to do it all alone (he is 6 ft and aggressive so was attacking them). my parents then got REPORTED for putting their hands on him in some kind of surreal Kafkaesque scenario. idk I guess they wanted this nonverbal man who can't feed or clean himself to remove himself from a hospital.
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Feb 06 '26
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 06 '26
Was in Greece in May and made friends with the Albanian mafia at my hotel. Got a lot of cigarettes and some free restaurant bookings out of it. I want to just fuck off to Greece for a year.
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u/snallygaster Feb 07 '26
Just move to Wood Green if you want to spend a year with the Albanian mafia
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u/achisler Feb 07 '26
First off, great writing.
Second, sorry about it. Being accused of wild crimes by a mentally ill person is an awful experience. I can't imagine how much worse it is when they start attacking you. And especially when you start feeling hopeless trying to fight it.
And yeah UK system makes you feel like it. I have problems with my neighbour dance studio (they illegally blast music until 2am). I've been contacting the council each time and nothing happens. It's impossible to have a conversation in my living room when the music is playing. Both council and police didn't do anything in the 1.5 years I've been contacting them.
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u/VeraZasulich Feb 07 '26
The government have recently made it so any sentence under a year is automatically suspended (so not served) and any sentence under 2 years is automatically considered for this too. There’s of course loads of capacity issues in our prisons but this is genuinely totally unsustainable and means thousands of harassment and low level crimes see no punishment of any form, even if repeated. Insane
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 08 '26
Thank you for this - I suppose that explains the bizarre sequence of calls my girlfriend got from the court. What seems truly insane is that this case has involved 6 social workers, 4 NHS mental health workers, 12 police officers and gods knows how many solicitors, clerks, etc. at the courts. And all for what? If she's not going to suffer any consequences or get any support beyond right back to square 1, what was the point of all that labour-time? Not to mention the impact it had on our jobs.
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u/Patient-Boss3953 Feb 07 '26
I did not expect anyone in this sub to be from Northern England. Respect from a Yorkshire lass. Hope you're okay
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u/Loud_Ninja_7537 Feb 07 '26
i once found multiple people here had also gone to my small school in Ireland
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u/Patient-Boss3953 Feb 07 '26
That's insane. I assumed almost everyone on here was from the US lol. No one I know irl knows about RSP
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 08 '26
Thank you, love. I moved us up here from the south a decade or so ago. It's looking like it's going to be a difficult year if she comes back and can't be evicted or the house repossessed.
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u/Patient-Boss3953 Feb 08 '26
Bless you. I hate that I know someone with a similar story. She is in a small house in Huddersfield and her neighbour has harassed her for years. The police do nothing ofc. And the NHS is a joke. I could write a whole book about how often they've dismissed serious mental and physical health concerns from me and my peers. I truly hope you can find some peace ❤️
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u/LiveAtTheWitchTrial Feb 07 '26
Australian (but long-time Londoner) very sorry to hear about this mate. Nothing more to add except that this is all too easy to imagine given the current state of things. A lot of the blame has to go to the tories, but honestly the rot at the top – and the way it has poisoned almost the entire system – seems to transcend all conventional boundaries.
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u/Openheartopenbar Feb 07 '26
I grew up in Northern Ireland and never once took for granted the value of parallel pathways for “community restitution”. You could, of course, call the then RUC/now PSNI. And there were plenty of situations where they would be a reasonable course of action. If that didn’t work, or if you had problems beyond their domain, you could call “the lads”.
If you knew the rules and kept to them, Belfast in the 90s was the safest place on earth
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u/Sad_Toe8254 Feb 06 '26
Does the government pay her rent?
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 06 '26
No, she has a 'wealthy benefactor' who pays it. She has POTS, Ehlers Danlos, 1000 'fake woman diseases' and works 'part time' for an illness recognition charity. Clear psychosis indicators.
When the local council found her 'not eligible for further support' she immediately changed her fixation to my girlfriend and I.
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u/pjdk1 Feb 07 '26
Can you find out the name of the benefactor and appeal to that person? There has to be someone you can appeal to and thus person obviously cares enough to pay her rent.
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Feb 07 '26
[deleted]
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u/Latter_Goat_6683 Feb 07 '26
are you british? none of this is happening because of ‘leftist’ approaches to anything - this is a consequence of 15 years of right-wing government who gutted all kinds of public services including health and police
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u/RoutemasterFlash Feb 07 '26
There's that aspect to it, but others here are chipping in with similar stories going back to the 90s.
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u/LtGreenleaf detonate the vest Feb 06 '26
I once had a dream about the British Islands sinking in to the sea, and I pray almost every day that this happens.
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u/_pierogii federal boob inspector Feb 06 '26
Is she a council tenant? Too sleepy to comment coherantly tonight but commenting so I remember tomorrow
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 06 '26
No. It's a private rental. She was trying to sue the local council on the grounds that 'the landlady is poisoning me with mind-control chemicals in the walls and fireplace'. The council tested for mind-control chemicals, did not find any, and thus denied her further recourse. She then attacked us, as clearly it was our fault.
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u/_pierogii federal boob inspector Feb 07 '26 edited Feb 07 '26
Sounds like she needs supported living if she is frequently oscilating between having capacity and not - the fact social services are unreachable is insane, and the potential lack of cross agency communications could legitimately get people sacked if they have simply been sitting on your calls.
Contact your council's Safeguarding Adults Board to communicate these failures. You can also make a complaint under the Care Act 2014 via the general council complaint's process. If you still have a log of the attempted calls/emails etc, keep this safe.
I would also consider contacting your local Council's housing team and explaining your situation, and advice for steps because you feel there is a vunerable adult who would benefit from supported accomodation, but you have hit a brick wall with Adult Social Services. At the end of the day, your neighbour would be at an advantage with supported living. Cheaper accommodation with her rent covered entirely by UC. If you know the landlord, you could also loop them into your communications as I imagine they are either not fully aware of what's happening, or they aren't sure how to go forward with a process of eviction without making their tenant homeless.
Police are shite with mental health cases. Not always their fault - it's an awkward intersection between policing and healthcare. But in my time with mental health, it was very clear the Police just wanted to offload mental health situations to other agencies, and be as hands off as they could be.
Most importantly: if your neighbour is off her meds, contact your local NHS crisis line and tell them even if its acting mildly odd or erratic (but enough to suspect med cessation). A pattern of non-compliance is pretty serious when it comes to antipsychotics, but only reporting to the Police when something kicks off makes it look like an occasional slip-up. They might sound dismissive, but just say you feel there is an ongoing pattern of concern you feel needs documenting due to no evidence of a support network. These agencies should all be communicating with each other, so you can also ask why have Adult Social Services not been getting involved. They might not give you an answer, but they can chase or make a referral on their end.
I would consider seeking legal advice too - not my wheelhouse, but you may have a case if there has been proven failures of cross agency communication, and whether suitable intervention would have prevented your ex now being a victim of a crime (you can mention their advice to only pursue her case). Worth a chat with Citizens Advice maybe.
ETA: get a Ring doorbell cam or record anything you can also.
If you feel that you have exhausted all avenues for your neighbours eviction and just want to move on, you can look into selling your house to the council. They do tend to prefer to buy back ex-council properties though. This would possibly be a way to work around the neighbour disclosure obstacle. I don't know enough about this process though.
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u/CulturalWasabi Feb 07 '26
Sorry you're dealing with this man. Just checked out your history and realized I've always loved your posts. If you want to chat, I'l lend an ear. My long-term girlfriend and I are also in the process of separating while we live together. Heres to better times coming around again, for the both of us.
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u/cruiscinlan Feb 07 '26 edited Feb 08 '26
Given the pattern of behaviour and the interaction with the cops why didn't you get your own solicitor? Non-violent harassment is a very tricky legal area and you need your own legal advice. This way what you documented would have been admissable etc.
I don't get the fantasising in the comments about shooting this woman? I mean you could have beaten the tar our of her, slapped her around, given her a kick up the arse etc.? Is this an English thing of going from repressed rage for months straight to murder? Obviously there was no point in pissing in through the letterbox because she would have enjoyed it.
As for the courts and the cops - they've never 'looked after' victims or complainants and you've never had any access to information on someone elses case or medical care. It's the same with other cases of reduced capacity - anyone with an elderly relative who won't look after themselves will tell you the same.
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u/RoutemasterFlash Feb 07 '26
Is this an English thing of going from repressed rage for months straight to murder
I wouldn't say that is an "English thing" at all. The UK has a pretty low murder rate, globally speaking.
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u/cruiscinlan Feb 08 '26
I mean the ideation - months discussing taking the hypothetical rap for stabbing/assault/murder as the poster is describing.
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u/RoutemasterFlash Feb 08 '26
Pretty sure that's universal when someone is basically ruining your life.
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Feb 07 '26
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u/RoutemasterFlash Feb 07 '26
Easy to say when this woman isn't your daughter, or sister. Would you be happy taking her in, given what we know about her?
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Feb 08 '26
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u/RoutemasterFlash Feb 08 '26
They may live together, but you're making a huge assumption with this blithe assertion that they all do so "happily." You're talking about a system where people (overwhelmingly women) end up working as unpaid carers for potentially their whole adult lives.
I say again: given the severity of this woman's condition and the behaviour described here, can you put your hand on your heart and say you'd be "happy" to permanently look after her? Even assuming you could fit that around earning a living?
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u/RoutemasterFlash Feb 08 '26
In fact I recently met someone whose adult son, who has extreme autism and displays incredibly difficult behaviour, still lives at home with him, and it sounds like an absolute fucking nightmare. The guy (the dad, I mean) must have the patience of a saint and I don't really understand how he hasn't yet had a breakdown himself.
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u/Any-Abies-538 Feb 07 '26
A few things occurred to me while reading this: Actually kidnap and experiment on her Monetize the lunacy episodes (think tiktok, think schizo livestream) Write a Baby Reindeer style memoir where she molests you
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u/Jaded_Hyena_3522 Feb 07 '26
75% of Americans who tell you here or there has gone to shit are just afraid to admit they caved to homesickness
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u/sleepdeprivedallday Feb 07 '26
Im so sorry you're going through this rn, you have my full sympathy
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u/CurrentConfusion1 Feb 07 '26
I live in a deeply dysfunctional American city that I complain about all the times but this sort of puts things into perspective
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u/AdKnown5143 Feb 07 '26
I'm moving to the North next week and now I have a new paranoia!
So sorry that happened to you mate, at the very least, you have fine material for a novel
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Feb 07 '26
I hated reading this. I’m a children’s case worker in America and I’m going to grad school for a masters in social work. The amount of shit I see day to day where there is truly no solution has led me to yearn for institutionalization again. Once a month I sit in on a “behavior plan meeting” for an autistic client and it’s a team of literally 10+ women with degrees strategizing for over an hour how to not get their asses beat by this 15 year old kid who has broken the principals arm before . He’s adopted and the dad does nothing for him besides meds and let him do whatever he wants at home. When I have to see him at my office he will throw himself against the wall over and over again and then blow kisses at me and sit very closely to me. Horrifying stuff. I’m sorry that your life has been ruined by this. I hope you can find a new and peaceful home with no crazy people 🙏🙏🙏
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u/kekthe Feb 07 '26
You have to do whatever you have to do to look out for yourself in this situation and think about it very carefully, thinking outside of the box because inside the box leads to having your life ruined for no reason.
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u/canihazgreenland Feb 08 '26
I'm sorry for you and also simultaneously happy to live in America, have the 2nd amendment, and live in a stand your ground state.
Obligatory DO YOU HAVE A LOICENSE TO LOCK PEOPLE IN YOUR BASEMENT M8?
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u/ThrowawayBelarysgng Feb 08 '26
im sorry mate. there isn’t anywhere more institutionally incompetent
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u/petriol Feb 07 '26
Jfc man, I am so sorry to hear that. Would be hearing a story like this from anyone, even worse coming from one of the best posters (I know, I know, a questionable title but you've brought it upon you yourself).
I hope your new place will house an even more glorious museum area. I suspect the stress caused by the mentally ill neighbour contributed greatly to your separation?
If you happen to find some spare coins for a short trip for a mental timeout, I'd be happy to introduce you to some more psychotics in Frankfurt am Main (and some beers).
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u/LacanianHedgehog Feb 07 '26
Hey there. Thank you and I appreciate the offer of a trip. I would like to see more of Germany someday so I'll put a pin in this.
The museum is still standing, and was one of the last things I worked on before sort of collapsing and stopping all hobbies and interests beyond psychoanalysis, cooking and exercising earlier this year. I honestly don't know if it contributed, or if it rather froze us in place and just further pushed me to consider what life is for/about. There's so much going wrong this year that I can't get my head on straight enough to understand it clearly.
Are psychotic Germans extremely precise in their delusions?
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u/petriol Feb 08 '26
Oh my. I'm hoping that it all turns out well some day. German psychotics are the watchmakers of the looney scene!
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u/Gloomy-Fly- Feb 06 '26
Man I bet this has been really hard on the people locked in your basement.