BEHIND CLOSED DOORS ...
Labelling hoarding a mental disorder may help those burdened by stuff
Hoarding is officially an illness, the World Health Organization has declared or, to use their terminology, “a medical disorder.” It’s a classification I read with a grim sense of amusement: like anyone affected by it knows, disorder is exactly the problem. Stuff stacked up everywhere, getting in the way; creased, crumpled, rotting and lost. But will their labelling of the problem help the estimated two to five per cent of us affected by hoarding ? Can it bring some order to the chaos?
In her later life, my mother was a hoarder. In the words of the WHO, she suffered from an “accumulation of possessions” causing “significant distress or impairment.” For years, she refused to let me through the front door, so I had no idea how bad her house had become until she was taken into hospital after a fall and I found her once-beautiful home had been wrecked.
Every flat surface was stacked with paper, boxes and food cartons; the floor was covered in a thick layer of old newspapers and unopened letters. Scrolls of lining paper and plaster dangled around a dark hole in the hallway ceiling where a radiator had burst; the kitchen floor was awash in black silt, and brambles snaked in through a broken door.
Back then, I needed the WHO’S definition.
Three years ago, my mother sat in the hospital ward, witty and alert, telling the nurses that she’d be fine to go home in a few days, with no more help than a handrail on the stairs, and they believed her — they had to, since she seemed entirely sane. My protests only finally registered when I brought in photographs of the house.
Had there been a recognized medical label for me to use, maybe I wouldn’t have had to argue so hard; perhaps my mother might even have got some help.
Hoarding is a private disorder, going on behind closed doors, its extent only ever realized, as in my mother’s case, when it spirals out of control. Even at the WHO’S lowest estimate of how many of us are dealing with the condition, that still means that more people hoard than have Alzheimer’s, and yet we rarely speak of it. Perhaps the WHO’S definition can open up that conversation: it’s needed. I would’ve been happy at the time to know that I wasn’t alone; that this dreadful mess wasn’t because I had failed as a daughter.
In the end, my mother never left hospital. She died at age 77 — just 10 days after the fall. This left me with the job of clearing up the mess she had left behind, and in doing so, I started to uncover some of the reasons why she hoarded.
Hoarding is undoubtedly a problem that goes far beyond a mere liking of knick-knacks and keepsakes.
The accumulation of stuff impinges on people’s lives for decade after decade; hoarders become alienated from their families, lose custody of their children. It’s a sign that something elsewhere in their lives is making that person unhappy.
My mother’s house represented a giant shout of pain against the tragedies that had filled her life. She’d been born a girl in a family that valued boys, so when her younger brother died of cot death, my mother believed she should have gone instead. She contracted polio, her father was made bankrupt, lost the family home, then disappeared. When she tried to start a new life and family of her own, her first child died at birth. Mementos of all these tragedies lived in her house: perhaps she hoarded to bury the evidence, or because she needed an outward display of her inner turmoil.
But the hoarding was only a symptom, and not the real issue.
In the face of these traumas, “hoarding disorder” seems only to describe the surface of what has happened, papering over the infinite human stories that bring it about.
And it may even be genetic: the children of sufferers are much more likely to repeat this behaviour themselves — a 2009 study found that 84 per cent of hoarders report a history of hoarding in a close relative — and so I am constantly assessing myself for the signs.