Posted on 01/04/2004 6:17:43 AM PST by TroutStalker
The cases never cease to fascinate: reclusive people trapped by their own accumulations, in rooms made unlivable by floor-to-ceiling heaps of newspapers, books and saved objects — from twist ties to grand pianos.
Some pass into legend, like the Collyer brothers, "the hermit hoarders of Harlem," who in 1947 were buried by the piles of urban junk that filled their four-story Harlem brownstone. But even less extreme examples, like that of the Bronx man rescued on Monday after being trapped for two days under an avalanche of magazines and catalogs, haunt the public imagination.
Such compulsive hoarding is being recognized as a widespread behavioral disorder, one that is particularly acute in cities like New York, where space is at a premium. The pack rat behavior ranges from egregious cases that endanger lives to more commonplace collecting that resonates with anyone who has ever stacked magazines to read later or bought more shoes than the closet will hold.
One woman, for example, found throwing out a newspaper so unbearable that her therapist instructed her never to buy one again. Another could not pass a newsstand without thinking that one of the myriad periodicals on sale contained some bit of information that could change her life.
And a third, trying to explain why she had bought several puppets that she did not want or need from a television shopping channel, spoke of feeling sorry for the toys when no one else bid on them.
The emotional investment that goes into hoarding makes it much harder to overcome than landlords or housing court judges often understand, said Randy O. Frost, a professor of psychology at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., and a national authority on the disorder who helped a group of medical, legal and social service agencies establish the New York City Task Force on Hoarding a year ago.
Similar groups exist in a dozen places, Dr. Frost said, including Seattle, Ottawa, Fairfax County, Va., and Dane County, Wis.
"I don't know if it's more of a problem in the city than elsewhere, but certainly the limited amount of space makes it come to a head," Dr. Frost added. "Most of this new attention is not coming from the mental health side of things, because many people with this problem don't seek help. It's coming from the housing side and services to the elderly."
Landlords, and lawyers and social workers who deal with elderly tenants, are often among the first to confront the problem.
Toby Golick, a clinical-law professor at Cardozo Law School, described the case of an elderly Manhattan man who rescued broken toys, discarded toasters and dilapidated umbrellas from the street until even his kitchen and bathroom were too crammed for use. The situation came to light only when the landlord could not squeeze in to fix a leaky faucet.
"He picked up things that he thought people were throwing away and still had life," said Ms. Golick, a founder of the hoarding task force, which will hold its second conference at Cardozo on Jan 21. "He was very upset that this was a disposable society and that people were very quick to disregard things of value."
In the end, she said, Cardozo's legal clinic prevented the man's eviction by working patiently with him on a compromise: the bathroom and kitchen would be cleared, and passageways tunneled through the piles of treasured junk in the other rooms. The turning point had been finding a resale shop that would accept some items, so the man would not have to throw them away.
Like the elderly tinkerer, the Bronx man, Patrice Moore, 43, saw treasure where others saw mainly trash. Interviewed yesterday at St. Barnabas Hospital, where he was recovering from leg injuries suffered when his collection collapsed on him, he said he might sue the landlord over the loss of comic books and articles from the 1980's about his favorite entertainer, Michael Jackson.
"I had to squeeze inside my apartment," he said of his 10-by-10-foot room, which rents for $250 a month. "I don't know how I lived that way. The problem was, I never got a storage space."
In one sense, Dr. Frost agreed, space makes the difference between eccentricity and pathology.
"People can collect and not throw things away without it really being a problem if they have the space and can organize it," he said. "It's only a pathology when it interferes with their functioning."
Pathological hoarding can affect people of all ages, and it seems to be related to obsessive-compulsive disorder, added Dr. Frost, who has researched the problem for a decade and recently received a grant to develop a model treatment to be tested on about 40 subjects at the Institute of Living in Hartford and at Boston University.
There are three facets to the problem, he said: enormous emotional difficulty throwing things away; compulsive acquisition — sometimes by buying things, but often by picking them up for free — and a high level of disorganization and clutter.
Many of the people afflicted seem to be unusually intelligent, he said. "They see more connections between things, which leads them to value those things much more than the rest of us do. "
But they also have difficulty finding conventional categories for the information they collect. Instead, they tend to organize their homes by visual or spatial cues — they might locate an electric bill, for example, on the left-hand side of a pile six inches deep, rather than where bills are filed.
This taxes their memory, so they tend to want to leave everything out in plain sight, piled in the middle of the room.
"They have to remember where everything is," explained Dr. Frost. "The rest of us only have to remember our system."
Equally important is their tendency to attach emotional significance to a wider variety of things. "For some it has to do with identity," he said. "I've had people tell me, `If I throw too much away, there'll be nothing left of me.' Almost like a Midas touch — if something comes into my ownership, it's part of me."
Finally, the psychologist said, "throwing something away makes them feel unsafe." The sense of security and comfort that most people feel in the familiar surroundings of home, hoarders may feel only when hemmed in by a nest of debris.
But there was no room for sentiment at the two-story brick apartment building on Morris Avenue in the Bronx from which police, firefighters and other city emergency workers extracted Mr. Moore. A man who would identify himself only as the landlord's brother said that he had stuffed Mr. Moore's trove of paper in garbage bags and stashed it in a back room for the night.
"Tomorrow is trash day," he said.
Janon Fisher contributed reporting for this article.
I'd have to haul all of that stuff from Virginia.
What I am REALLY not looking forward to is the familial in-fighting that is sure to happen. I would as soon to give the stuff to the Church, but that will never fly with my sister-in-law.....She is unlikely to do the work, but WILL complain regardless of what we do!
Tia
Check out www.flylady.net. I have been cleaning my dad's house this weekend and I have gotten rid of some junk! He wasn't too bad of a hoarder, but I just haven't gotten around to going through his stuff.
Now, my grandmother on the other hand was a hoarder. She was so bad that she would take things out of the trash can that I had thrown away, newspapers and stuff like that. I never in my life saw so many bread ties, grocery bags, plastic containers, jars, just stuff. I learned to throw things away after she went to bed on trash night ;o) She had so much clutter that her pretty things were buried or in the back of cabinets.
I also have a cousin who is a hoarder. I cleaned her house for her and there was about 2 feet of junk on the floors. It took 3 dumpster loads to hold all the bags. If nobody intervenes she will be like the person in the opening post. At least she doesn't hoard cats thank God.
While cleaning out my grandmother's stuff after she died, I found an old daguerrotype of a woman, a picture that is possibly 150 years old. My mom had a vague idea that it was a relative of her mother's mother but didn't know any more. I intended to keep it more for its antiquity than anything else. But lo and behold, the velvet padding in the leather case fell out as I handled it. I found a notation giving the woman's name, birthdate (1827), birthplace (Edinburgh, Scotland), and the names and birthplaces of her parents. Turns out she is my great-great-great-grandmother, and opened up a whole new line of genealogical inquiry.
I urge you to save the really old pictures, and pictures or obituaries that provide potentially useful genealogical information. Even the worst pack rats tend not to have more of these than a small photo album can contain. Keep it, or perhaps give it to your local family history society.
-ccm
My HUSBAND is bad... saves bread bags, rubber-bands, twist ties and bits of foil.... and he is only 45!
I feel sorry for our daughter when she has to go through our stuff! LOL!
Tia
Did you see the Animal Cops show where they removed about 250 cats from this lady's house. It was gross! They handled the situation pretty well but she was obviously mentally ill. I just can't imagine the smell.
Recently, my cousin helped clean out a house that had been abandoned by a "hoarder." The homeowner had been evicted for non-payment on the mortgage, and had time only to remove a few personal items before she got the boot. My cousin told me that she removed ten 50-pound sacks of pinto beans and a vanload of canned food in cases, clothing that had never been worn and still had the tags on them, two chainsaws (also brand new and never used), toys still with the Wal Mart receipt shoved in the box, and four Mini-14 rifles, never fired. She filled her SUV three times and her father filled his pickup twice with the stuff they took out of that house, and there is still so much stuff in the house that you have to climb over the piles to move around.
After I yelled at her for not calling me to help clean this place out, I was stunned that people do this sort of thing and buy mountains of crap they will never use in 10 lifetimes. I'm convinced that hoarding is a mental illness just as much as schizophrenia.
You could do worse! We once lived next door to an old man who collected just about everything. He even had a collection of $100's in shoe boxes just in case. That was in addition to his collection of oil leases.
Semper Fi
Strangely, the couple in the situation I related make over $150,000 a year between them. The couple are infamous in the community for writing hot checks; their electricity had been turned off for 6 months before my cousin went over there. The house itself was only 2 years old and was worth $200K itself - how they passed the credit check to obtain the mortgage on it is still a mystery.
This illness is obviously not confined to the penurious.
Being hoarders, I still want to take my metal detector over there and give their back yard a good thorough sweep. No telling what is buried back there, and they bounced checks at the local jewelers like crazy.
I'm still sick over that bad decision!
So, no cure then, only possible good finds to be made by archeologists at a later date? ;)
So, no cure then, only possible good finds to be made by archeologists at a later date?
The couple can doubtless be treated, but first they must be found. They disappeared in the night, current whereabouts unknown.
Incredible.
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