OTTAWA — Greg shuffles to and fro in his Ottawa apartment, sifting piles of belongings, trying to decide which bits and pieces he can part with.
There’s a sense of urgency: The 57-year-old has two days to tidy the premises sufficiently to pass inspection by the City of Ottawa’s public health department and Ottawa Fire Services.
The last thing he wants is a mandatory cleanout by a city-appointed contractor. “It’s not a bunch of junk,” he says.
Greg — who asked to be identified by first name only — is lanky with longish sandy hair. He’s a good-natured sort, divorced, no kids, and lives on a monthly disability benefit of about $1,000.
His one-bedroom apartment contains a cornucopia of possessions: tools, compact discs, video tapes, books, papers, building materials, piles of magazines, flyers and catalogues, shopping carts, a stethoscope and part of a pump system from a boat.
Electronics and computers are Greg’s passion. He builds and repairs. Parts are everywhere: receivers, speakers, monitors, cables, manuals, computer mouses, mouse pads, software, disc drives, connectors, circuit boards and ink cartridges.
He likes being able to see the whole shebang and describes the experience as “sitting in a huge bowl of stuff.”
However, the apartment is too small, he complains. Many things are kept on the balcony. Overflow has also spilled into four storage lockers in the basement.
That’s where Greg’s mattress is. With no space in the bedroom, Greg sleeps on the couch.
“All of this stuff I’ve been saving for years, I was going to throw it out,” he says. “But all at once is a bit shocking.”
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Public health nurses say they can usually tell if they’re dealing with a hoarder before they even enter the house — excessive garbage and debris, blocked windows and an overgrown garden can signal chaos within.
Other homes are outwardly tidy and the clues more subtle: cars used for permanent storage or curtains puckering from the pressure of boxes.
As Louise, a 71-year-old grandmother and self-confessed hoarder, observes: “Houses looking impeccable on the outside are not all roses inside.”
Hoarding is a hidden activity. Hoarders often do not allow even family members or friends past the front door. Until recently, it was mostly public officials in housing, health, fire prevention or elder services who caught glimpses of the condition.
Now, hoarding is in the spotlight.
Two popular reality TV shows — Hoarding: Buried Alive and Hoarders — chronicle the lives of people who live in squalor because they cannot throw anything away.
“Hoarding disorder” is being recommended for inclusion in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), used by doctors worldwide.
“Never has hoarding been so visible as it is today in westernized societies” writes Randy Frost, co-author of a new book Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things. “Perhaps the abundance of inexpensive and easily accessible objects makes it the disorder of the decade.”
Frost, a Boston psychologist, is one of the world’s top experts on hoarding. He says hoarding examples have been found on every continent except Antarctica.
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Compulsive hoarding is defined as acquiring and failing to discard excessive amounts of things which appear to be of little use or value.
Hoarders’ homes are filled with extreme amounts of clutter. Some of the most commonly hoarded items are papers, magazines, clothing, bags and books.
Many hoarders are emotionally attached to their possessions and become anxious when confronted with discarding them.
Pack-rat behaviour crosses the line into pathology when it interferes with how a person lives and causes distress.
Stacks of objects can make homes fire traps and rooms unlivable. Clutter raises the risk of falls and may lead to rodent and insect infestations and mould. Putting out fires or cleaning up messes means there is a cost to the public purse.
The word hoarding can be misleading.
Often hoarders are generous, acquiring things for others. Some see themselves as environmentally conscious recyclers. Cat ladies — long a stereotype in Canadian society — believe they are rescuers.
Hoarding can break up marriages, scar children, alienate friends and even cause death.
Last November, a 61-year-old woman with mental health problems died in a fire at Cornerstone, a supportive housing building in Ottawa’s downtown core.
The fire started in her unit, caused either by candles or a lamp with faulty wiring that she had collected from the curb.
Clogged with newspapers, plastic bags and books, the apartment was considered a fire hazard and had led to a bedbug infestation.
She was also collecting and storing her body waste. Cornerstone staff had been trying to help her sort through her belongings.
The fire resulted in structural damage to the building in the tens of thousands of dollars. Nineteen women were left without secure housing until the building reopened in five months later.
Meanwhile, a woman and her daughter were banned from owning animals for two years in March after 33 cats were removed from their Ottawa apartment. According to the local Humane Society, only four of the 33 cats could be nursed back to health; the rest were euthanized.
The women were ordered to undergo hoarding counselling, and the society reserved the right to regularly inspect their home for seven years.
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Although the television trend may be new, the disorder is not.
Literature from as far back as the 14th century makes reference to hoarding.
Dante Alighieri reserved the fourth circle of hell for “hoarders” and “wasters” in The Inferno. Charles Dickens’ character Krook in Bleak House, written in 1852-53, was “possessed of documents” in a shop where “everything seemed to be bought and nothing to be sold.”
In 2005, a Japanese newspaper reported on a 56-year-old man whose apartment floor collapsed under the weight of 20 year’s worth of newspapers and magazines. (The term in Japan is gomi yashiki, or garbage houses.)
American writer E.L. Doctorow based his latest novel Homer & Langley on the real-life story of two wealthy and reclusive hoarding brothers in Manhattan.
Police broke into their five-storey brownstone in 1947 after receiving a call about a dead body. Squeezing through tunnels in the tightly packed house, they discovered the body of 65-year-old Homer in a small clearing. Blind and paralyzed, he had died of starvation. After nearly three weeks of searching, workers found Langley’s body, not more than 10 feet from his brother. He had been crushed beneath a booby trap he’d set for intruders.
Cleaners removed 170 tons of clutter, including 14 grand pianos, a Model T Ford, the remains of a two-headed fetus and an early X-ray machine.
The house was demolished and in 1965 a small park was built on the site named Collyer Brothers Park. In 2002, the local community association wanted to change the name because it was “not a positive image,” but the City turned down the request.
The parks commissioner said “not all history is pretty but it’s history nevertheless.”
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If hoarding is soon classified as an official mental sickness in the DSM — an enormously influential catalogue that is undergoing its first major revision in nearly 20 years — two to five per cent of the Canadian population could be labelled as having a mental illness.
Proponents of its inclusion say the goal is to increase public awareness, help identify sufferers and stimulate research and the development of treatments.
Frost notes that 40 years ago, rental self-storage units were virtually non-existent.
“Never has there been so much stuff for people to own and so many ways of peddling it to consumers,” he writes. “Perhaps hoarders are the casualties of marketing — acquisition addicts who can’t resist a sales pitch.”
Where materialists crave the new, hoarders see special value in society’s unwanted trash, he says.
“In our culture of collecting, hoarders hold a unique if unenviable place, where impairments of the mind and heart meet the foibles of the wider culture.”
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Back in Greg’s apartment Pierre Bazinet and Rai-Anne Hunter from Moving Along … Your Way! have arrived with garbage bags. The Ottawa company provides help “for extreme clutter difficulties,” according to their brochure.
“We’re going to organize this,” Bazinet, who is also a mental health worker, tells Greg. “We won’t be able to do it all. We’ll compress it so you can pass inspection.”
The Moving Along team knows that saying goodbye is hard. There’s anxiety and indecision. Most things have meaning, value and potential utility.
They give control to Greg by asking permission to remove items. It’s an arduous and time-consuming process.
“Can I start with this?” Bazinet asks, pointing to a bundle of wooden boards. “Oh no,” says Greg, he plans to use them as backing for shelves.
A copy of Time magazine from 2002 cannot be thrown out because it contains an article on headaches Greg wants to read.
“Can you get a recent article on the Internet?” asks Bazinet.
“I don’t have Internet,” says Greg. “Food is more important.”
Child-restraint straps off shopping carts? “Oh no! They stay,” Greg says emphatically. “I make suspenders out of them. I hate tight belts.”
“How about if I stand here and you hand stuff to me?” says Bazinet. “I’ll be your assistant. We’ll use clear bags so you can see what we throw out.”
Greg gives him the handlebars for an exercise bike. “This is definitely garbage.”
A piece of cardboard can be sacrificed “because I’ve got a big piece downstairs in my locker.”
Bazinet picks up a booklet for a military-grade GPS. “Do you need this?”
It joins the discard pile along with a pair of ripped shorts, an old toothbrush, two pairs of pants that don’t fit, an old phone jack and a collection of razor-blade covers.
After six man hours, four shopping carts are full. It’s a start.
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Two days later, Greg buzzes up public-health nurses Carolyn Crisp and Jana Podolak. The front door swings open without obstruction to reveal clear swaths of parquet floor and pockets of tidiness.
“Is this the right apartment?” jokes Podolak. Crisp’s mouth drops open. “Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Look at the space!”
Standing in the bedroom, Podolak asks: “Are you still hoping to get your bed in here?”
“It will take a month or two,” says Greg. “But it had to be done. My goal over the next year-and-a-half is to take out these boxes one at a time and sort them.”
The fire inspector has already given his approval.
“From our perspective as nurses we don’t have any concerns anymore,” says Crisp, before she asks Greg how it went with the Moving Along team.
“I don’t think they’re evil,” Greg says. “I suspect they’re not minimalists themselves.
Ottawa Citizen
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