Do you know a real life "Hoarder'?

In My Humble Opinion
101

Have you ever looked at those (supposedly obsolete books) and realized how relevant they still are (or are not)?

I have some of my dad’s college notebooks, ca. 1938, plus some ponderous electrical engineering texts from the 1950’s, and the underlying knowledge is still valid AFAIK. Maxwell’s equations are still gold, 200 years later!

On a related topic, our local library will accept donations of books for their annual book sale in July. I used to work with the dude who sorted the donations into sale-able stuff and worthless stuff. He routinely discarded old encyclopedias as worthless and unsaleable, and discouraged such donations.

Which seems to me to be a shame. I have a 1956 encyclopedia that is really fun to browse, and a set of “how stuff works” (1970?) semi-encyclopedia. Although they take up a lot of space, they are often the first things people pick up when they look at my library, and quite valuable to me. But they will no doubt be the first to go when I do.

102

I have a friend who constantly says “What’s the downside to doing [such-and-such]?”

So what’s the downside to donating/selling/tossing excess books?

In my case, to be brutally honest, it’s “Well, a month from now I’ll reach for That Good Ol’ Book and it won’t be there. And I’ll have a pang of sadness. Then, a year from now, I’ll think about Another Good Ol’ Book, and have another pang of sadness.”

So, will the happiness of having room in my house (and the contentment that comes from living lightly with fewer possessions) offset two pangs of sadness?

When I figure that out, THEN I’ll clear off that bookcase… I promise!

103

I understand completely. I like to re-read a lot of my books Some of them are now out of print and would hard to replace if I got rid of them.

Incidentally I end up acquire books faster than I can read them. So now I have a stack of rougly 50 books I need to get around to reading.

104

I still remember a set of geography books from the 1930s that my dad picked up somewhere. They were fascinating to me as a kid.

Also, one of my aunts gave me a bunch of old books when I was a kid. My favorite was an early Nancy Drew – the ones with the blue covers and the illustrations showed Nancy looking a lot like Carole Lombard. But one was a Victorian children’s anthology, and I’ll never forget a poem about “letting the old cat die.” Apparently, it was a 19th C kid’s expression for stopping actively swinging on a swing and just letting the swing slow to a stop by inertia. It had enough of a creepy edge to stick in mind forever.

105

I deal with code enforcement and consequently have frequent dealings with hoarders. The condition was officially added to the DSM 5 several years ago, which is significant because an official diagnosis can open up possibilities of receiving therapeutic assistance. I’ve met scores of hoarders and it seems they all have one thing in common: some event - death of a loved one, divorce, victim of a violent crime, abandonment, etc. - has emotionally traumatized them. They attach emotional significance to objects and compulsively collect stuff that often has no apparently objective value. Keeping things represents a certain level of emotional security, whereas throwing things out represents ‘loss’ to them. They tend to have elaborate internal justifications why any given object is at least potentially ‘necessary’ and therefore never ‘junk’ to be disposed of.

Well-intentioned family interventions where the hoarder is separated from their home environment and rooms wholesale ‘cleaned out’ and the contents disposed of can be traumatic events to individuals with this condition, and unless placed on a therapeutic course of treatment, will, in any event, be a short-lived state of affairs, as such individuals will typically work overtime to rapidly re-fill the spaces again, because the underlying condition has not been addressed.

The thing to understand is that the contents of a hoarder’s home is a symptom of the underlying condition. If you know a hoarder the best and most effective thing you can do is not to clean up for them, but to encourage them to get psychological assistance and treatment to deal with this compulsive behavior. This is an illness, not a moral failing on their part. Reaching out and encouraging such individuals to get help can at the same time also be a challenging thing to do, as many hoarders tend to be rather intelligent people (I’ve known, judges, anesthesiologists, and bankers with this condition) and are usually mortified at the prospect of how others might view them.

106

Paul Graham wrote an essay about the modern-day condition of people accumulating “stuff.” Not really about truly pathological hoarding, but still relevant to this discussion. Here’s an exerpt:

He does make allowances for the accumulation of books, but of course even those have a limit. If you have stacks of books covering the floor because you have no more shelf space, then it’s possible that your life might be better if you gave some of them away.

107

My mom had become a hoarder until she had a liver transplant. I think two things changed: 1. she stopped medicating herself with alcohol and buying things. And 2. she realized she was going to run out of money.

We were cleaning out her garage last time I was there around Christmas (she’s downsizing and, now that she realizes she’s surrounded by things she will never use, she wants to get rid of them as quickly as possible) and found boxes and boxes full of clothing she’d purchased, all with the tags still on. Must’ve been something like $1,200 worth of nice clothes. She also bought these beautiful shoes (think Pradas and Blahniks) that she never wore. Then there was the designer makeup and the kitchen and garden implements. Three pressure cookers, four crockpots, several extra sets of dishes and flatware for “just in case” and “entertaining.” Alcohol from 20 years ago. Several sets of encyclopedias - that sort of thing.

I really do think a lot of it was the alcohol and her habit of using that and her purchasing to avoid feelings and thoughts she didn’t want to deal with. She’s still not exactly confronting those thoughts, but she at least is managing the consequences of having avoided them for so long. Also, she’s come to the realization that her money won’t last forever and she doesn’t want to outlive her finances.

It took her about 30 years to get there, though. And nothing I or my sister could say was able to sway her. She really had to come to her decision to stop and clean up on her own.

108

My mother is a hoarder, although there are worse examples. Her basic problem is to a lesser extent that she liked to amass things, to a greater extent that she has a problem with throwing things away. She has openly stated where she got this habit from: her father’s habits. Namely, my grandfather grew up in a small Serbian town during the Great Depression and had a very tight-fisted father. He himself was somewhat tight-fisted with his family, and probably very loath to throw things out. My mother would do things in the past like give me and my father newspaper articles to read for our education. Articles that did not get read got thrown on a pile which she wouldn’t discard, because “they provided invaluable information for life”. When I was a student, she started regularly buying books from the used book store at the library. These piled up in the basement and my father and I had to install more shelves for her to keep the books in, while my bookshelf got moved to the garage (and where some of my books got destroyed when the roof leaked).

Regular household items piled up as well; my mother found it very difficult to throw them away, but rather she held regular garage sales. Not bad in and of itself, it did bring some extra income to the household, but she could have thrown out at least a little more than she did…the extreme was when, at one point, she took me around other people’s taken-out garbage waiting to be collected and brought home items she found there with the intention of selling them at her garage sales, “so as to teach me how one can even make money in this way”.

Shortly before I left home, she realized that she might need to be more diligent in throwing things out, but this induced a cognitive dissonance in her that has lasted for many years. During the last summer before I left home, she ordered my father and me to take an English china set to an antique store and attempt to sell it there. The shop assistant told us to wait for the owner to come. When she finally came, the owner offered IIRC $60 for it (a good price IMHO - she has to sell it and make a profit). My father said he would have to call his wife. He did, and the price was too low for her! So we had wasted a perfectly good weekend afternoon on this. A few days later, she reconsidered, but the antique shop was no longer interested in taking it.

Now my parents are 72 years old and live in a large house still relatively full of things that will never be used again. They don’t hoard any new things, but for example my mother is now crippled and permanently bedridden and will never put on more than 90% of her clothes, or any of her shoes, again. But these things still take up space, and for example she has many pairs of slippers/sneakers that were all put into a plastic garbage can for storage and take up space in a bedroom used for that purpose. Different items of her clothing are found in 4 or 5 different places around the house; most of them could be given to charity with no ill financial effect on my parents, who have some $1.2 or 1.3 million invested in secure funds which generate income. Over the years, she has very slowly gotten rid of many things (most of her book hoard is now gone and she got rid of the news articles years ago), but they may have to downsize sooner or later, and it may be difficult for her to finish the job. I currently communicate with my parents only laconically and formally, and live in the Czech Republic while they are back home in Canada, so I don’t know if they have been trying to get rid of anything else since I left Canada for good. If they are, I’m sure it’s going very slowly.

109

My neighbor family is a hoarder family. It seems to be primarily the mother. The father tolerates the mess as do the kids, but the kids are clearly embarrassed and unhappy about the situation.

My kids hate to go to their house. They say it is dirty, smells bad, and there is no place to sit.

All of those things are true.

On the rare occasion I’ve gone there I’ve noticed a thin ‘clean-ish’ line in the middle of the long entry hall where people walk from the front door to the living room. Outside of this trail is thick dirt and dust and small tumbleweeds of animal fur.
The living room is a mass of junk and clutter. Every flat surface is piled with mountains of stuff. The couch usually has one or two “spaces” available amid more stuff but often stuff must be moved to find a place to sit.
Next door in the kitchen it is the same. Every surface is covered and it’s also impossible to wash your hands due to the piles of dishes overflowing the sink.

When I leave the home, I feel a need to take a bath and change my clothes. It’s not just the stuff and the dirt that triggers this in me, it’s also the smell. The smell clings to you.

Their family van is just as bad. There are ‘spaces’ amongst the clutter to sit, and a space for your feet to rest on the floor, but you will still be hemmed in and constrained by all the stuff. The dad’s car is less overwhelming but it is still pretty cluttered.

They have been our neighbors for about 20 years and moved to this new house several years ago following a house fire at their previous home (which was just as bad). I hoped starting over in a new house would give them an opportunity to not allow this to happen again but it did.

110

Even though our house looks something like a hoarder’s paradise (we’re getting ready to move, and stacks of boxes delineate corridors in some of the rooms), we’ve made substantial progress in de-cluttering.

In the past month, I’ve sold off loads of used books, and virtually our entire collection of LPs and cassette tapes, as well as discarding lots of other non-used/unuseable items.

I had a brother-in-law who was something of a hoarder. My family didn’t really qualify, though the basement and attic could’ve benefited by jettisoning certain items.*

*I’m still pissed off that my father gave away our Lionel train set and my prized Early Wynn model baseball bat.

111

I forgot that there was a hoarder in my neighborhood. I used to see a beige mid-90s Toyota Camry parked on the street. It was completely full of stacks of papers, except for the driver’s seat. The stack in the passenger seat went to the roof and covered 2/3 of the dashboard. The back seat was entirely full from footwell to ceiling. The rear suspension had collapsed and one of the rear tires was replaced with a space-saver spare. I never saw the trunk, but I can guess what it looked like.

The car used to park illegally a lot, mostly by overstaying its time on the meters but occasionally by parking in neighborhood spots that required a parking pass. Very rarely did I see the car with a ticket. I suspect cops went easy on the owner because they figured the person was homeless. I don’t think he was. I never saw him sleeping in the car, the car moved every day, and, most importantly, there weren’t really things you’d need to live with in the car. I never saw clothes, food, blankets, personal care items, etc. Just papers. I suspect the person just filled every cubic inch of his home and stuffed the overflow in his car.

I stopped seeing the car after my municipality hired a contractor to issue parking tickets. The contractor got a fee for each ticket it issued. I suspect the car’s informal lenity disappeared and an avalanche of parking tickets appeared in its place.

112

My mother’s former cleaning lady is a hoarder. (Yes, she was a cleaning lady and a hoarder).

She was kicked out of her house (inherited from her mother) because it was full and stuff was spilling out into the yard and the neighbors complained. She was only supposed to go back into the house to clean it out. Her notion of cleaning it out was to move as much as she could into her van and live there. It didn’t help.

She actually asked if she could move in with my parents. My mother is a compassionate person, but no fool. She said Yes, as long as she didn’t move any of her stuff in. There was a bed and a dresser and a closet she could use. Almost immediately she started moving stuff in “temporarily” and immediately after my mother told her to move out. Lasted less than a week.

She moved in with a friend and my folks moved into assisted living, and they lost touch.

Don’t know what happened to her or the house. Don’t want to know.

Regards,
Shodan

113

Nope, was never going to happen.

Moving to a new space or simply throwing everything out is not going to work, and after awhile the hoarder(s) will be back to where they started. Unless you interrupt/fix the bad habits and behaviors that lead to the mess in the first place things will never change.

114

I had an experience today that fits right in this thread.

For a few weeks, I had not been able to reach a good friend and professional colleague of mine by phone (2 phone numbers) or email, and no emails got returned. He is a newspaper columnist, and his weekly column was appearing just like clockwork, and that seemed like a good sign. Let’s call him D.K. for now.

But it occurred to me that D.K. might be in the hospital, and wrote a few month’s columns in advance, timing them just right, but…

Fearing the worst, I stopped by his house today. I had been there before to give him a ride, but was never inside the house. His front door has a little vestibule, and the outside door was open.

As I entered the front, the smell hit me. Piled from floor to ceiling in the tiny entryway were bags of garbage. It looked like someone took out the trash for weeks, but never got farther than the door. Maybe they thought that putting it in the yard would be too unsightly, because the yard was fairly clean.

The inner door had a doorbell, so I rang it, then knocked frequently and loudly, and called his name. No answer, but I could tell the door wasn’t locked, so I pushed it open and announced my presence. My friend was sitting in an easy chair with only a blanket covering him, and I saw that he was alive.

But if I thought the entryway was abominable, the living room was much worse. Piles and stacks of boxes, bags with recyclable aluminum cans, a layer of bottles, just general junk. I could see into the kitchen (I couldn’t walk there without blazing a trail with a machete) and it was more of the same. I didn’t see much food out in the open, but maybe the empty cans were covering it up.

Mentally, D.K. sounded OK – he is going through chemotherapy and other medical procedures. OK mentally if you call the living environment OK.

I asked if his son could help him clean up the mess. He said the son lived downstairs (that’s a basement, not a valid apartment), rent-free, and wouldn’t help. I was afraid to look at his son’s quarters. Would I be attached by rats or swallowed up by life-size mold growth?

I tried to be as diplomatic as possible, so I stood there (no place to sit that I trusted without first donning a hazmat suit) and suggested some options. I don’t think I made much progress, so I left. I never found out why the emails and phone messages weren’t returned, but I didn’t want to push it.

Apparently, this has been going on for some time. I spoke to the sheriff later, and without giving an address or name, described the situation and asked if there was some way a welfare or health department person could handle this case. The sheriff knew exactly who & where I was talking about, and said it was that way a year ago, and there’s only so much they can do. However, he promised to have a social worker contact me next week.

So, to answer the OP, Do I know a hoarder? I do now.

I ran home and plan to spend the rest of this weekend cleaning my own place. It’s by no means as bad as this, but some people might be upset by the 2 boxes in the living room that don’t belong there, and the breakfast dishes haven’t yet been washed. One man’s ceiling…

115

Your post made me think. What’s the difference between a hoarder and a collector?

I have a lot of books, and am constantly acquiring more, especially on favorite topics. I would hate to be called a hoarder, and I regularly prune the collection to remove books that no longer have any relevance.

I think of collectors as devoted to one topic or subject, with a reason to collect, and their collection is organized, at least to some extent. In contrast, a hoarder is someone who gathers stuff without discrimination or direction, especially stuff that you would have a hard time making into a serious collection or which is so common as to be unlikely to ever be valuable as rare.

I know someone who collects vintage, foreign, and obsolete beer cans and bottles. He displays the collection neatly on shelves and in glass cases and can tell you the history of each item. I know someone else who has non-vintage, common brands of cans and bottles strewn across the floor several feet deep and gathered in bags with no attempt to sort, display, or catalog. I would call him a hoarder.

Is my definition universal? Do you have a better one?

116

Because hoarding behavior often follows trauma, and a house fire is certainly traumatic, the mother is probably now using that as an excuse.

117

Could it be done one frame at a time? (Don’t tell SIL if that is in fact true!)

118

Teach her to print out each frame, changing ink cartridges as needed, and then bind them with a cover… and she’ll have made her very own Barely Usable Flip Book!

Tell her she can do the same thing with Gone With The Wind, or the feature-length film of her choice!

119

I am not a hoarder, but I do tend to collect and save things.
I’m an engineer and a hobbyist, and I never miss an opportunity to buy a new tool. I also save scraps of any material I am working with - wood, metal, glass, tubing, plastic, stone, etc.
So, we are in the middle of a construction project, and one of the tasks that I needed to do was to move everything out of my garage, so that it could be renovated and turned into my new office.
It took me maybe 4 full days of work to move everything, and even I am somewhat surprised at the amount of stuff there was. Of course, I had 26 years to pack everything into the current space, so it “blew up” in volume when I moved it, but still - it’s kind of frightening,