A secret and shameful world: ‘Hoarding is an illusion of control’
It was an episode of CSI that convinced Josie she needed to get help.
In House of Hoarders, crime scene investigator Nick Stokes crawls through the garbage-strewn house of a woman with hoarding disorder when — spoiler alert — he finds a badly decomposed body.
Josie looked around her east Ottawa apartment — knee deep in garbage and cluttered with unopened bottles of Vim, Mr. Clean and box after box of unused garbage bags — and felt a shock of recognition.
“I kind of noticed it was my situation,” said Josie, who asked that her last name not be used. “Not the murder part. The hoarding part. I knew I could become like her in the long run ... It had been on my mind for a while that I’d had a problem and this was not normal. But to see it in a TV show that I love to watch just made it more real.”
Hoarding disorder, as it is now officially known in the influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is a condition that affects two to six per cent of the population.
On Wednesday, Montfort Renaissance and Options Bytown will deliver the results of a year-long study that aims to help social agencies better respond to hoarding situations. The $240,000 pilot project was backed by the Champlain Local Health Integration Network.
Not only does hoarding carry the risk of disease and illness, it takes an enormous emotional toll on sufferers and can be lead to eviction and homelessness.
Josie went on the Internet that same night and soon connected with Elaine Birchall, an Ottawa therapist and “clutter coach” who is one of Canada’s leading experts on hoarding. Four years later, Josie has her apartment under control, though she still struggles with the disorder every day. She deflected a question about whether it took courage to ask for help.
“I don’t see it as courage. I saw it more as desperation,” she said. “I was so afraid of people finding out that I wanted to stop it before I lost control. Hoarding is an illusion of control. You believe you’re the one who is controlling what you get rid of and what you collect. But in actuality, it controls you.”
Birchall said most of her clients, like Josie, come to her on their own asking for help. That’s far different from the public perception that hoarders are turned in by neighbours or authorities.
“In the States, most of their intervention is based on enforcement,” Birchall said. “People are found out and then the enforcement agencies intervene. Easily, 70 per cent of my referrals are self-referrals — that’s almost unheard of in the States.”
Hoarding was once thought to be a form of obsessive compulsive disorder, but since 2013 it has been listed on its own in the DSM. Now the subject of its own reality TV show, hoarding was little known until 1947, when the sensational case of Homer and Langley Collyer was splashed across the front pages of New York papers.
When police entered the brothers’ three-storey Harlem mansion (through an upper floor window; the door was blocked), they found it stuffed floor to ceiling with junk, including 14 pianos, 25,000 books, a car, a gun collection, countless newspapers — and the bodies of Homer and Langley Collyer.
Nearly everyone with hoarding disorder is dealing with other mental illness, most frequently chronic depression and/or general anxiety disorders, said Randy Frost, a professor of psychology at Smith College in Massachusetts and author of the book Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things.
People with the disorder perceive objects differently than most and place a higher value on them than warranted. Like a child who comes home with pockets full of pebbles and string, the hoarder can’t filter out what is useful from what is not.
Like Birchall, Frost was brought in as a consultant on the Montfort Renaissance and Options Bytown hoarding project.
“That inability to process information carefully and quickly contributes to the hoarding problem,” Frost said. “People can’t distinguish important from unimportant features. So they have difficulty deciding whether to keep it or discard it, and once they decide to keep it, they have difficulty organizing it, so it all ends up in the middle of the room.
“There’s nothing here that is not the case with all of us,” Frost said. “Our possessions are magical. They have an essence that goes beyond their physical characteristics. Like that favourite ticket stub from a concert. It’s the same phenomena, but with these people, it just extends to more things.”
Like many people who hoard, Josie suffered trauma, in her case from a sexual assault. She also battles depression and general anxiety disorder. And like many hoarders, Josie felt a deep sense of shame. Working with Birchall, she slowly began to understand what was behind her disorder and started the slow task of getting her life under control.
“It’s a source of high anxiety for me. When I go into a phase of cleaning, I can go for days without sleeping,” Josie said. “We would pick things up and I would describe my feeling about getting rid of it or putting it away and that would help. I would shake, cry, have dry heaves. It was pretty intense.”
Birchall, who was working with Frost when she decided to establish her own counselling service 13 years ago, said she treats clients with a holistic “Canadian approach” that treats all the client’s issues, not just the hoarding.
“It is not about cleaning up,” said Birchall. “It’s not about getting rid of things. It’s about getting that person to change their relationship to those things. That’s when the cleaning up happens naturally ... If you just throw out and they haven’t come to terms with letting go, then you’ve just created a void and they will fill it.”