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Time to Talk Day 2025

To mark Time to Talk day the Scottish Community Mediation Centre puts a spotlight on neighbour disputes and mental health.

Talk with neighbour or community mediators around Scotland, and eventually you will hear about the rise amongst their clients of mental health issues in the past few years. There may be a range of contributing factors, from increased social isolation through to how we view the world around us. But whatever the causes may be, when two neighbours are in conflict, the impact of this conflict on their lives and those closest to them often includes their mental health.

In thriving communities, neighbours will often positively engage with each other, look out for one another and talk through any difficulties that they may have between them in a practical and peaceful way. Where those connections, those relationships, have not been built the danger is that a difficulty between two neighbours becomes not just a source of conflict, but something that impacts on their mental health.

In Scotland, disputes about noise have been the single largest type of dispute that community mediators come across regularly. The impact of noise on someone’s quality of living, their relationships around them and their sleep can be significant.