‘It’s like living in a storage facility’

Tags

deprivation hoarders, hoarding, obsessive compulsive hoarders, sentimental hoarders

‘It’s like living in a storage facility’

Jasmine Harman loves her mother – but for quite a while, she didn’t go to visit her. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see her,” she says. “It was that I literally couldn’t get into her house. There was so much stuff in the hall that the front door wouldn’t open properly and then, if you did manage to squeeze yourself in through the tiny gap, the whole place was piled high with junk. You could barely stand upright and most of the rooms were completely inaccessible.”

Vasoulla, Jasmine’s mother, is a hoarder of pathological proportions. Her five-bedroomed house in north London is crammed with belongings and furniture; clothes, toys, books, pictures, family memorabilia, bric-a-brac of all kinds cover every surface; some of the rooms are stacked floor to ceiling, like an unkempt corner of a warehouse. “It’s like living in a storage facility,” says Jasmine, 36. “And that’s no life at all.”

Vasoulla, 57, was always a hoarder. Jasmine remembers all too clearly the heart-stopping fear when she was growing up that her friends would find out how messy her house was. “I remember a boyfriend taking me home and asking if he could come in and use the loo, and me thinking, oh my God, of course he can’t use the loo … he won’t even be able to get into the loo.”

When they were younger, she and her sister and three brothers occasionally tried to clear everything out. “We’d spend hours trying to sort things out and cleaning because we would be desperate for our house to be like our friends’ houses,” she says.

Other mothers might have been thrilled with their teenagers’ efforts, but not Vasoulla. “When she came home and found what we’d done, she’d scream at us,” says Jasmine. “It was a weird way to grow up.”

As the children grew older, Vasoulla’s hoarding worsened. “It dominated our lives. It was the only topic of conversation between me and my siblings. Meanwhile, the house was piled higher and higher with stuff because, as well as never throwing anything away, my mum was always at the shops buying more,” she says. “My youngest brother Cameron [now 14] was much younger than the rest of us, and eventually three years ago things got so bad he couldn’t carry on living there and had to move out – he went to live with my sister. Like most teenagers he was pretty messy, but my mum was way out of his league.”

Jasmine was perplexed by her mother’s hoarding habit and desperate to get professional recognition – one of her bugbears is that hoarding disorder is not officially classified as a mental illness, which means research into its causes and treatments has been scant. A television presenter who fronts the Channel 4 property show A Place in the Sun, she made a documentary about her motherlast year. “I had thought it was a pretty rare problem – you feel so alone, like yours is the only family affected by it,” she says. “But after the programme went out, I got about 2,000 emails and messages, many of them from people saying, ‘I know what it’s like – we’ve got a hoarder in our family too.'”

She set up helpforhoarders.co.uk, a website to offer mutual support. It brought more stories (one woman posted to say that her dad is such a hoarder that her mum has had to move out; another says her brother’s house is so full of belongings that he is living in squalor). Now Jasmine has made a second documentary, which deals less with the overwhelming symptoms of hoarding and more with the fundamental question of why people become hoarders.

According to Paul Salkovskis, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Bath and an expert in obsessional problems, about 1% of the population have hoarding issues so great that they are life-dominating; and many more have problems with holding on to stuff. So how do you judge how severely affected a family member is?

“What you have to ask yourself is, does the acquisition and retention of items render the living space in the house unusable?” he explains. “Typically, the hoarder isn’t the person who complains about the problem – it’s the people who live with the hoarder. It’s not that the hoarder doesn’t think there’s an issue: it’s that the issue is something they don’t want to have to confront.”

Put crudely, says Salkovskis, hoarders fall into one of three categories. The first group, around 25% of the total, are people with what might be termed “obsessive compulsive hoarding”: their problem is harm avoidance, because they fear things could be contaminated and worry about contaminating others if they get rid of them. The second group, who make up about half of all those affected, are deprivation hoarders: they have been through a period of massive deprivation (for example, war, displacement or another sort of loss) and they hoard because, having lost so much once, they feel a need to hold on to possessions in case catastrophe strikes again. The third group – and these people, says Salkovskis, are the hardest to treat – are sentimental hoarders. They have been damaged by unpredictability and possibly even neglect during childhood: for them, possessions have become more reliable than people and they invest in them accordingly.

For Vasoulla, says Jasmine, hoarding has been closely linked to various experiences of loss. “My mum was born in Cyprus, and her father died there, at a time of political unrest, when she was four. After that my grandmother brought her children to live in England: and for my mother that meant losing her grandparents, her friends and all her treasured possessions. She went back to Cyprus when she was about eight: but then, after a while, the family decided to return to England, so my mother lost everything yet again. I think the fact that she kept losing loved ones and friends meant she started to lavish her love on possessions instead.”

There is some evidence, says Jasmine, that hoarding runs in families – and her grandmother was also a hoarder, though she was not as bad as Vasoulla. “Maybe my mum had a tendency to hoarding, and it was made worse by her suffering all these losses,” says Jasmine. When her parents’ relationship broke up, and again when Jasmine and her older siblings left home, Vasoulla’s hoarding increased. “The biggest irony is that by collecting so much stuff, my mother is literally shutting us out – the people she really loves, and longs to be closer to – because we can’t get into her life because of all these possessions,” says Jasmine. “That’s what makes the condition so heartbreaking.”

One thing that is certain, says Jasmine, is that simply chucking a hoarder’s stuff out doesn’t solve the problem. “People so often say, why don’t you just get a skip and get rid of everything,” she says. “Don’t they think we’ve tried that? It’s not the answer. Unless you address the deeper issues, the hoarder just goes out and buys a whole lot more stuff to replace what has gone.”

The good news – though Jasmine says she is loth to hope for too much, too soon – is that Vasoulla is currently undergoing a form of therapy called emotional freedom technique to help her face up to, and deal with, her difficult memories. So far, the results are encouraging. “About an hour after one session, Mum turned to me and said: ‘The books can go.’

“That was a huge breakthrough: she has thousands of books, enough to run a bookshop. But whatever had happened in that session, she felt she could move on from the books, and that was a big turning point,” says Jasmine.

Hoarder in the Family will be screened on BBC1 soon

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Hoarding: The art of letting go

Tags

hoarding, OCD, Therapy

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/hoarding-the-art-of-letting-go-7562760.html

Oh, I wonder how that got there … What is it?” Layla Jade (not her real name) has picked up a folded silver chewing gum wrapper, that has fallen, somehow, onto her carpet. She holds it close to her face, squinting, trying to work out its origins and whether it can be salvaged. After a few moments she places it carefully onto a side table.

A glamourous-looking woman, aged 58, Jade is a recovering hoarder. She is a member of the UK’s first therapy group for hoarders, run by Orbit Housing Group, a community housing organisation based in Coventry. Her homely living room is now covered with comfy cushions and cat-themed knick-knacks, but it was once almost uninhabitable. A narrow path from here to the kitchen and on to the bedroom was forged through towers of clutter, piled high in each room.

“I can’t throw anything away. I’m just sentimentally… I’m attached to everything.” She sighs. “It could be a piece of paper a friend has written on and I won’t get rid of it.”

Each object here has a story, from the print of Jack Vettriano’s “The Singing Butler” hanging in the bedroom – a whimsical scene of a couple dancing in formal wear on a beach, given to her by her mother for Christmas – to the bejewelled ruby lampshade, purchased on a whim on the way to a blood test at the local hospital, to the less practical things, like her collection of 22 dressing gowns, mostly in animal prints, or the pile of perfumes that she has owned for 40 years and never used. “I have all this, it’s perfectly nice, but I won’t use it and I can’t get rid of it. When I think about throwing things away, I think, ‘but I got that when I was at so-and-so place,’ or, ‘my ex brought me that.’ Oh, if I could get him out my head…”

There is surprisingly little research available on hoarding, so little that the current version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the psychologist’s bible) doesn’t recognise it as a disorder in its own right, merely a possible symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). But new research has shown it is a separate problem and its sufferers will show “persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of the value others may attribute to them”. Jade’s distress at the thought of throwing things away is a symptom that’s very hard to overcome. The limited data available says hoarding affects around three per cent of the population, although this seems a conservative estimate, as hoarders tend to be very secretive about their hoarding and only those who admit to it and seek help can be monitored.

“Clutterers don’t like to be called hoarders. It makes you think of an old miser,” says Arthur Porter, 63, during the group therapy session, “we’re not greedy or anything like that.” Porter has “what is termed as high-performing clinical depression”, he explains. Like Jade, whose difficult marriage and persistent depression led to agoraphobia and then hoarding, he also has a collection of different, yet interrelated, problems. His father was bi-polar and also a hoarder. After Arthur’s father died, he found bits of wood and thousands of rolled-up plastic bags in the loft, one inside the other. Right in the centre of the layers of bags were rolls of old one-pound notes from 1982. “I’m like him, but he was better with plastic bags. I think it’s genetic,” says Porter.

It could indeed be genetic, says Gail Steketee, a professor at Boston University School of Social Work and an expert in researching the disorder. “We know that there does seem to be a genetic link, but so far, we don’t have good information about whether hoarding is more likely to occur in someone who grew up in a hoarded home, but was not genetically related,” so it could also be a learnt behaviour.

Arthur certainly emulated his father. He collected plastic bags, but also books and DVDs. They piled up in his home until the piles became towers and the towers touched the ceiling. Then one day, “I had a little fire,” he says, “in a student cooker as the main cooker packed up.” The fire department arrived and saw there was just a foot-wide path to walk to some rooms in the house – others were blocked completely with his “collections” (over five tons of books and DVDs) and a “great load of plastic bags”. Porter was used to navigating through the mess, but the fire officials didn’t approve. “I said, ‘are you going to fine me?’.”

That’s when Orbit became involved. Porter attends the group session once a week, where he and the other members are assigned tasks like doing the washing-up or throwing away one DVD that they don’t like. It’s a very gradual, often frustrating process, but without it the members risk becoming imprisoned in their homes, not to mention the health and safety risks like vermin and blocking fire exits. “When Sheree [one of the Orbit helpers] went away, I went to pieces,” says Porter, with a nervous chuckle. “I need Orbit to cope. It’s someone there who knows where you are at.”

Another group member, Beverley Drummond, 60, denies she has a problem. “I’m not a hoarder, I’m a collector,” she says. “My mum died four years ago. She wouldn’t allow a DVD player in the house, but now I have my John Wayne and my Octonauts … OK I’ve got some DVDs but I’ve boxed them all up. OK, there are mice, but they’ve not caused me any problems.” A helper at the group interjects, saying, “And how many teddy bears have you got?”

“Well I collect them to cheer me up. I’ve cut down, though. I used to buy four a day, now I only buy them if they’ve got a nice face.” It transpires that Drummond has collections of calculators and mobile phones, too – in fact she collects anything that her mother used to disapprove of. Her collection of bears is close to 900 and growing, and the DVD collection caused a problem for the housing association because it filled several rooms; it was a safety hazard.

Orbit is working with a team of therapists and researchers from Coventry University to come up with a “toolkit” to give out to fire services and housing organisations across the country on what to do if they encounter a hoarder. Darren Awang, an occupational therapist working with the hoarders’ therapy group says that through its work, Obit has found that hoarding can be triggered when a controlling parent dies, as in Drummond’s case, and also by more general sudden traumatic events.

“Many local councils will try to empty the property when they encounter hoarding, but this can cause the hoarder inordinate distress and then they often revert back to the behaviour anyway,” explains Cathy Sharman, a staff member at the self-help group. She says it requires a more “long-term approach” and that a combination of methods is needed to help, because each hoarder is different.

Part of the reason hoarding seems more prevalent now is due to profile-raising shows, such as Hoarders, an American TV series that goes into hoarders’ homes, and Channel 4’s Cutting Edge series, which recently highlighted the problem in a documentary, called Obsessive Compulsive Hoarder. But another reason could be that the ready availability of cheap goods is actually triggering the impulse to hoard in more people than before. For someone who grew up with rationing, or in a poor family, it requires a totally different mindset not to be seduced by cut-price offers. So does today’s environment make it harder for hoarders?

“Yes, I think it does,” says Professor Steketee, “the media urges us to buy, buy, buy and markets are flooded with cheap items. We have become a throw-away society and many people react against this, wanting instead to save and repair, rather than be wasteful. Others are attracted to the colours, textures and shining objects. This cannot be helpful to people with even a slight tendency to hoard.”

Certainly, Jade’s love of disposable fashion will strike a chord with many people. “I feel I’ve got too much stuff, especially clothes,” she says. “It’s ridiculous, ordering it all out of catalogues when I know I’m not going out anywhere, I’ve got nothing to dress up for!” Then why, some might wonder, does she get it? “Because I look forward to it coming through the door.”

Although the group is helping them with their disorders, there is a sense that the compulsion to hoard will never completely die out. Jade will still feel sentimental about her possessions, Drummond will want to collect bears and Porter will continue his father’s legacy, maybe one day becoming as good as he was with plastic bags. It’s as essential and ingrained for them as going to work or doing grocery shopping. Plus, as Porter puts it, it’s not all doom and gloom. “It would take something out of your life if you just stopped,” he says.

Hoarders need help to change their behaviour

Tags

hoarding, OCD

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/jan/03/hoarders-help-clutter-change-behaviour

It was a daily battle for Arthur Porter even to get to his front door. Towering piles of books, papers, magazines and shopping bags filled his hallway, and put much of the rest of his house out of bounds. Living without hot water and not daring to put on his gas fire because of all of the clutter surrounding it, Porter says he knew his hoarding had got out of control. “It had got to the stage where I was almost living my life like someone in the middle ages. I knew things couldn’t go on as they were but I couldn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel,” he says.

It was only when the fire brigade was called out after his faulty cooker started smouldering that Porter, 63, a former accountant and teacher, began to get the help he needed. He was referred to Orbit Care and Repair, a home improvement agency that supports older and vulnerable homeowners. It helped him to release equity from the home in Whitley, Coventry, where he has lived all his life, to pay for home repairs, and to start clearing the clutter he has accumulated over decades.

“When I first went to visit Mr Porter he could hardly open the front door,” says Cath Sharman, deputy manager of Orbit. “There were piles of stuff up to the ceiling in places. He would bring in shopping and forget he had bought it. Not just food, but electrical gadgets and books. The neighbours had put in an insurance claim and it turned out an overflow pipe was dripping down from one of the bedrooms he couldn’t get into. He didn’t have a workable kitchen and his health was suffering.”

According to the University of London’s institute of psychiatry, between 2% and 4% of the population are affected by a tendency to hoard, and it appears to be a growing problem. “I’ve been in this job for 23 years, and it’s more common now than it ever was before,” says Kathie Martin, senior agency manager of Orbit. “We set up a specialist support service because with the number of cases we were seeing our arms just weren’t big enough to cope.”

Despite TV programmes such as My Hoarder Mum and Me, and Obsessive Compulsive Hoarder highlighting the issue, there is a real lack of consistency in the support on offer. Yet without the right support, hoarders become increasingly reclusive, are often shunned by their neighbours and are threatened with legal action or, if they are tenants, with eviction. And there are serious safety risks from fires and vermin infestations.

Orbit has teamed up with Coventry University for the first research project in the UK examining hoarding. It hopes to develop better ways for professionals to help. Council, charity and fire-service professionals have been offering their expertise, and the next stage of the project will involve interviews with hoarders about their behaviour. Darren Awang, senior lecturer in occupational therapy at the university’s faculty of health and life sciences, says he hopes the research will uncover more about the issue nationally.

“This is really managed at a local level and although there are people like Orbit doing very good work, the efforts have been piecemeal,” he says. “We are trying to find ways of managing the problem more effectively. It doesn’t do anyone any good to just go and clear a house on an enforcement basis, because the behaviour just manifests itself again and the issue doesn’t go away.”

The experience at Orbit suggests that the most severe cases of hoarding may be triggered by a traumatic experience such as a bereavement. Porter says the roots of his hoarding go back to his youth. “My dad was a clutterer and it just seemed natural to me,” he says. It spiralled out of control once his father died, his mother went into a home for older people and he battled with depression, which went undiagnosed for years. Although mental healthprofessionals recognised he had a problem with his home, he says he had just been told to sort out the mess himself, until Orbit came along.

For Brenda and Jack Smith, their hoarding escalated after they became mostly housebound because of ill health. They had spent years washing out of plastic buckets because their bathroom was unusable – but work on a new wetroom funded by equity release could not be carried out until Orbit had arranged for their home to be cleared.

“I accumulated clothes and I had about 60 pairs of shoes I’d never worn. If I saw something I liked I got it in all different colours,” says Brenda, 70. “I think it’s because when we were young we couldn’t buy stuff, as we didn’t have the money. So when you get a bit older and can start buying things, you go a bit mad.” She gets emotional when she talks about the difference clearing her house has made. “Before, it was terrible – we couldn’t manage and we were having falls because of how much stuff there was everywhere. The change has been lovely.”

Sharman says many cases of hoarding go unreported for years because people are unsure of where to go for help, or sometimes are too embarrassed to ask. “We learned a lot with Mr Porter,” she says. “When we got the council in to clear his house and a lot of people came in to take things away, it was horrendous for him. We learned you can’t do it like that. These people have not died, they still live there and you have to do it at their pace. We have to build a rapport and get a relationship going.”

Walking into the downstairs of Porter’s house, only a few carrier bags and a couple of boxes bear witness to his hoarding issues. But he is still sleeping downstairs as there is more work to be done upstairs. “He’s come a long way,” says Sharman. “But he still needs support. It can be a long process.”