The fascinating reason women like Sue can’t throw away ANYTHING
Her obsessive hoarding made her home uninhabitable and nearly ended her marriage
SUE RICHARDSON has ten grandchildren yet can count on one hand the number of times they have come to visit. ‘Having them just pop in, giving them their tea, letting them do some colouring-in, run up the stairs, maybe even stay over. I never had that,’ she admits. ‘I couldn’t, not even with the two grandchildren who just live round the corner. My daughter wouldn’t let them come here at all.’
The reason why her home in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, became a child-free zone will be baffling to most.
There was no family falling out, no acrimonious relationships with her children or their spouses. Indeed, it’s clear Sue adores her son and two daughters and their expanding broods.
But the uncomfortable truth is that her home had become a health hazard. Every room was so crammed full of clutter — including, ironically, a collection of more than 100 dolls destined never to be played with — that an accident was just waiting to happen.
We’ve all experienced days when our homes are less than visitor-ready, so how bad must Sue’s have got? Particularly since her doll-collecting hobby couldn’t sound more child-friendly. Sue, 60, takes a deep breath before explaining.
‘It wasn’t fit for children to be in,’ she says. ‘ You couldn’t walk across most of the rooms. There was a danger of something falling on them, or them tripping over something.
‘In the bedroom, we couldn’t get to the window to pull the curtains. They stayed open for years. In the kitchen, we couldn’t really cook because there was nowhere to set anything down.’
Was there even a table to eat on? ‘Oh no. There was so much junk piled high that there wasn’t room for one,’ admits Sue.
It was an appalling, shameful way to live, most people — including Sue — would agree. But in Sue’s case, what’s deeply upsetting is that she would once have prided herself on her housekeeping skills.
When her children were growing up, she kept a ‘normal’ house, she insists. ‘It was never a show home, but it was the sort of house you could invite people into. And I did. We had friends round for dinner. People would come and stay over. The beds got made every day. It was normal.’
By last year, however, her home had become a no-go zone.
‘Even my husband, Neil, only came home to sleep and eat,’ she confesses. ‘He couldn’t bear to be here. Obviously, the family didn’t come. If I wanted to see them, I had to go to their houses.
‘My daughter, Sian, did try. Once she brought the kids round but she couldn’t get the buggy in the house so we sat in the garden, but eventually even that stopped.
‘I was so ashamed I didn’t want anyone in my house anyway. I wouldn’t let friends in.
‘If the postman rang the doorbell, I’d only open it a little bit and go outside and shut the front door, and talk to him on the doorstep. I couldn’t bear him looking into the hallway.’
HOWdoes a normal, once perfectly house-proud person get themselves into such a state? It’s an intriguing question being asked in a new Channel 4 series called Britain’s Biggest Hoarders, which looks at the growing phenomenon of compulsive hoarding.
There was a time when women like Sue would just have been dismissed as slovenly or lazy. But in recent years the problem of hoarding has been taken more seriously, and seen as a symptom of mental illness rather than a lifestyle ‘choice’.
Compulsive Hoarding was actually defined as a mental disorder in 2013, and recognised as such by the NHS last year with some experts now estimating that between two and five per cent of adults suffer from it to some degree.
A rash of TV shows over the past few years have shone some light on the problem and the challenges it presents. But this programme attempts to explore the often complex emotional triggers behind the disorder.
Clare Dahill is a compulsive hoarding expert who works with sufferers, and was enlisted to help Sue. She says the problem affects people from all social backgrounds, rich and poor. ‘I’ve dealt with retired teachers, social workers, people from very wealthy backgrounds. One man hoarded tractors — he had the land to do so. I know of a lady in Sussex who lived in a big house and ran the local neighbourhood watch scheme.
‘Only after she died did her neighbours discover she had been crawling in and out of a window to get into her own house, so massive was her hoarding problem. Hoarding exists everywhere, and affects people from every social strata.’
The problem has always been around, she agrees, but in the past sufferers were perhaps just dismissed as ‘that odd old lady who has 99 bin bags in her garden’. But now the world is waking up to the fact that these people are mentally ill and need help.
‘I’ve been in a house where the woman had no heat and no electricity. She’d been cut off because workmen had refused to go into the house because it was dangerous.
‘She had an obsession with collecting pick and mix containers, the ones you put sweets in. She had hundreds of them, but she was living in a space the size of a single duvet. She was eating sandwiches mostly, and cooking with a single camping gas stove. How can you call that a lifestyle choice?’
The problem, of course, is that once you accept that this is an illness, you have to decide how to help sufferers.
And therein lies the problem.
‘At the moment it’s very piecemeal,’ says Clare. ‘ Whether sufferers can get help depends on where they live. Even if they can get therapy, there is the question of who does the clearing? It’s hugely expensive. I once spent 25 minutes talking to a woman about whether she could bear to throw out an empty toilet roll tube.
‘The hoarder’s brain does not follow the logic the non-hoarder’s brain does. They might have a letter from the Queen and a used tissue, and will be equally possessive about each.’
This obsessive mindset can tear apart families, stresses Clare and certainly another couple in the programme — 40-year-old Scott and his wife, Faith — are at breaking point because of Scott’s hoarding.
His hobby (or ‘obsession’ might be a more adequate word) is collecting electrical parts in the hope of someday making something with them. His
tinkering, however, has taken over their three- bedroom house in Blackpool, to the point that the couple have to spend most of their time perched on the end of their bed. Their living room is actually uninhabitable, so high are the piles of old washing machines, manuals, wheels and leads.
As the cameras pan around the house, we are told that there are perhaps 20 vacuum cleaners in various states of disrepair. The irony, of course, is that there isn’t a square inch of carpet visible to be cleaned by any of these. ‘There is nowhere for me to sit, stand or do anything,’ wails Faith at one point. ‘Is it just going to stay like this for ever?’
The couple have split up several times over Scott’s inability to confront what is clearly a psychological problem, but each time Faith has returned, because she loves him regardless. But how much more can she take?
‘It’s ruining our marriage. I want a proper house and a husband who doesn’t fill every inch of the house. What about me?’ she rages. Her husband simply sits and cries when it is made clear to him that he will have to choose between his wife and his piles of ‘stuff’.
Sue also admits her marriage has been put under huge strain because of her obsessive hoarding. Indeed, she confides that deciding to let in the TV cameras — and alongside them, a team of mental health experts — was a last resort.
‘I was terrified. Of course, I didn’t want anyone seeing how I lived. I couldn’t even bear my friends to see. But I also knew I had a huge problem and I couldn’t tackle it alone. People had tried to help me before. The doctor had come round once, and seen the state we were living in. He had referred me to someone, but it didn’t make much difference. I needed more.’
When we first meet Sue and her husband in the programme, Neil is at breaking point. A naturally tidy person by nature, his shed, from which Sue is barred, is all neat lines and order.
Inside the chaos of his home, however, he seems close to tears.
‘This is not the way I live,’ he says. ‘She’s lost the plot.’
Little wonder Neil doesn’t like to spend much time in his home. When he isn’t at work, he is at the garage he rents, tinkering with cars and bikes.
Sue spends her days moving dolls clothes from one pile to another, or looking for dolls she has misplaced. When she does venture out, it is to charity shops to buy dolls, knickknacks and clothes. At home, she spends hours poring over internet sites looking for more dolls.
So why the obsession with dolls? When the show starts, Sue has more than 100. Some are in bits; one seems to have a head but no body.
‘I always loved them, but when my daughter left home I gave her bedroom over to the dolls and that’s when it started to get a bit out of hand,’ she tells me.
A psychologist has the sizeable task of working out why Sue feels the need to stockpile possessions. The truth soon emerges. She had, we discover, a very difficult childhood and was in and out of foster care.
‘My mum was a single mother in the days when there was a real stigma about it,’ she says. ‘She couldn’t cope. She put me into care when I was about two. And again when I was maybe five.
‘They were very nice people and I was looked after, but I remember feeling that I had been sent away. I wanted my home. I think there was always a void there.’
THISrevelation prompts Sue to start exploring the complex relationship she had with her mother, and it makes for upsetting — if revealing — viewing.
It was Sian, Sue’s daughter, who contacted the programme-makers in the first place, in despair that she could not make a difference.
‘She had tried. They all had,’ says Sue. ‘Once she had come to see me when I wasn’t well and she couldn’t find me in the bedroom.
‘At that point she said, “Mum, this can’t go on”, and I’d agreed to let her help me.
‘We started to clear the hall, but when she began to throw stuff out, I resented it. I just couldn’t let her do it. In the living room, you couldn’t sit down. When we did finally get help, the decluttering lady was astonished to learn that there was a sofa under all the mess.’ It took four months of psychiatric care and counselling for Sue to allow those around her — the TV team and her family — to start opening the bin bags and clearing out. The progress was pitiful; the kerfuffle over one pair of old net curtains painful to watch. Now that the cameras have gone, what is her home like?
It’s still not exactly minimalist, she laughs, but several skips worth of junk have left the building, and hundreds of bin bags have gone to charity shops, while some of her treasured dolls have been donated to local schools.
‘You can see the floor and sit down on the sofa,’ she says.
‘At last — I’d forgotten what it looked like.’
Everything is different about Sue’s life now, she says. Neil is at home more and their marriage is ‘ completely different’. And, crucially, her grandchildren have been allowed back in.
‘Maisie, who is six, came round the other day and could sit with her colouring-in book, and she went running up the stairs to see my dolls,’ she smiles. ‘That meant the world to me.’ Britain’s Biggest Hoarders, Channel 4, tonight, 8pm.