Engulfed in clutter, hoarders keep heaping it on

Deadly consequences
Hoarding can also be dangerous, even lethal.

In January 2006, a 62-year-old woman from Shelton, Wash., suffocated under a pile of clothing in her debris-filled home. In July of that same year, 14 firefighters were injured while putting out a three-alarm apartment fire in Queens that was classified a “Collyers’ Mansion,” named for the infamous brothers who, in 1947, suffocated and/or starved in a Harlem brownstone filled with more than 120 tons of floor-to-ceiling clutter.

And it doesn’t stop there. Condos and townhouses packed to the rafters with newspapers and other heavy objects can crack floor joints, pull on adjacent walls and structurally threaten the homes of neighbors. Animal hoarders can cause untold physical and psychological damage to the trapped creatures they’re “trying to help.”

And then there’s the vermin issue.

“I went into one home where the rats were so awful, they’d eaten through this woman’s oxygen lines,” says Seattle Police Officer Suzanne Parton. “The house was declared a biohazard — it was full of dead rats, rotting food, all kinds of paper and piles of clothes. It was nasty.”

Cases like these have spurred many cities and counties to create hoarding task forces, which cobble together agencies such as health departments, fire and police, family services, mental health services, housing, and public works in order to tackle the problem.

Resources Obsessive-Compulsive Foundation Bio-Behavioral Institute    Helping Hoarders  Children of Compulsive Hoarders  Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health hoarding fact sheet

“Ten or fifteen years ago, we didn’t really look at this phenomenon as a hoarding problem,” says Jim Armstrong, chairman of the Fairfax County (Virginia) Hoarding Task Force, the first of its kind in the country. “We looked at it as a fire code violation or a sanitation violation or an animal abuse issue. But what we’re trying to do now is work in a coordinated fashion, to get involved before it gets out of hand and tragedy occurs.”

Christiana Bratiotis, research assistant and therapist for the Compulsive Hoarding Research Project at Boston University, sees task forces that combine mental health services with local enforcement agencies as “the ticket” to helping many hoarders.

“We have someone with the big stick saying you’re in violation of public health and safety codes and then we have the carrot, a social worker or public health nurse who tells them ‘We’ll advocate on your behalf and help you stave off an eviction while you’re in mental health treatment.’ That’s where we’re seeing lasting change.”

And as for those quick fixes such as reality TV shows that encourage family members living with “pack rats” and “clutter bugs” to take care of the issue with one quick “Clean Sweep?”

“I watch some of those pop culture shows and just cringe,” says Bratiotis, “because I know what the after effect of that kind of intervention is going to be. In six months time, the stuff will just be back.”

Diane Mapes is a Seattle freelance writer and author of "How to Date in a Post-Dating World."

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