Nimbyism and awareness of mental health issues

I spoke to someone in a pub who expressed the so-called NIMBY viewpoint or mentality. NIMBYISM comes from the term Not In My Back Yard, and although it's sometimes a view which is valid on grounds against institutionalisation, and which can be part of it's protest, often people who hold the NIMBY view have some extreme solutions such as closing all half-way houses down, contradictory notions about their own social and emotional lives, and extreme social dogma's about society being too individualistic.

Often people who hold NIMBY views have had valid experiences of seeing half-way house areas as run-down, clinical, and unfit for long-term housing, but the first blame is sometimes put upon the ex-patients as "not being real people" or "not having social or unique problems which are in some ways common to us all". Discipline is seen in terms of getting people out of half-way houses, and that may not be such a bad thing, but we also have to take many things into consideration, and it's a very complex issue.

Social workers are often used to get psychiatric diagnosed-people into half-way houses with a very disciplined approach, but I agree with some people that social workers should also use their quaint charms to get those people reintegrated back into society as well. Re-housing is a complex issue, and some people don't really understand what's involved in it, and I can understand why they may get angry and frustrated. So so-called NIMBY people may agree that half-houser's should be reintegrated and re-housed, but they have really got no idea what the solutions could be for that to be achieved.

Some so-called NIMBYISM may have some genuine concerns behind it, and it would be stupid to censor the language or terminology of anyone who expresses what might be termed a NIMBY view. The NIMBY view is also protesting against the slum society and mentality, and I agree to some extent with that argument as well, because half-way houses are a form of ghettoisation and it does turn areas into slums.

This person I spoke to in a pub about this, said that if the half-houser's have got problems on in the inside, then they're weak on the outside. Whilst I question what he means by "weak", he is obviously addressing issues of emotional strength, and dealing with social problems that way in order to survive. He then went on to say that they can't handle too many problems - perhaps other people's mental health problems - but if they can handle it, then they're fine.

Whilst I initially thought that his idea of "strength" and "weakness" was solely to do with physical strength or very masculine orientated strength of will, he described feebleness as a lack of emotional strength, role-playing, and allowing other people to repress, distort, and walk all over us.

I agree with him about having or developing realistic emotional strength, but I think he's in some ways too idealistic, although he said "It's not people who are weak, it's the world". That's his view of survival, he's an emotional realist; although he wasn't very clear about what sort of emotional and social support is required if any.

Not everyone has the right sort of family to support them emotionally and socially, and I thought his political idealism and emotional realism dwindled into fatalism, because he just said that there was nothing he could do to help those people, but that he thought everyone potentially had emotional and social strength. He's an emotional realist, and which is valid, but he's also a political idealist, and he doesn't seem to have very clear views on social or interpersonal solutions, and he falls into fatalism and the very same individualism that he originally criticised about society and others.