My ex-boyfriend/fiance turned out to be a hoarder and it ended our relationship. I’m bipolar and while that has it’s issues with mood swings, it’s manageable! He refused to face the fact that he couldn’t stop himself from bringing home every damn thing he found, from broken toys in the park to things he found IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD! He’d stop the car in traffic and pick up garbage in the road and bring it home!! It was embarrassing and dangerous!! I had to finally end it when he took a bottle of chocolate milk out of my Jeep, that I’d warned him had been in there for almost a week, in hot and cold weather, and he put it in the frig. Well, my kids might have found it and drank it and gotten sick, so I chucked it and kicked him out. I told him a while later that he needed help and possibly medication but he refused and just said it was ME that needed help. I’m already on meds. LOL!! Hoarding has since been legally declared a mental illness and I think more people need to acknowledge it, accept it and GET HELP!! After watching a marathon of “Hoarding: Buried Alive” today, I could only watch a couple episodes before I had to change it. I watched my own home slowly be turned into a junk pile by that man and his ‘collections’ and it’s just WRONG!! Mood swings come and go but hoarding STAYS! Get it fixed!
Have you taken your meds yet?
Did you have to think super hard to come up with that one, genius? lol!! Omg, stop I might cry. Not. Honey, I survived more than you could ever imagine so you’re gonna have to try so much harder than that if you want to insult me.
See, here they go again. I shouldn’t be watching the “Hoarding” marathon because it’s just one right after another of these poor people not being able to part with their JUNK!! This last woman started hoarding because her husband said he’d leave her if she kept going to yard sales and bringing home a bunch of crap. So he left her and she’s turned her home into a junkyard. She needs therapy and probably meds to get stabilized in order to deal with obvious unresolved issues with men, and it sounds like, abandonment issues. Most of these people need to be admitted to clinics and be under professional care for their own good and that of their families’. I feel really bad for them, truly, but it’s not healthy!! Others face the problem and fix it and that’s great! But, at some point it needs to be said, this is a serious issue that needs to be addressed!!
Hey wacko if you got a problem with hoarders take it to the pit.
TWWWEEEEETTT!
BOTH of you cut out the jabs immediately. Take it to the Pit if you must, but the jabs stop beyond this post.
Longshanks, if you don’t like a topic, you don’t have to reply. Your first post is out of line for this forum and calling names is against the rules here. You WILL be warned if you do this again.
Rockfox, welcome to the SDMB. If someone insults you or posts something you don’t like, report the post instead of replying back in kind…because doing the latter is a fast way to get warnings yourself.
So why didn’t you throw out the chocolate milk instead of leaving it in your car to rot for a week?
Rockfox73, welcome to Straight Dope. 
I think you are right & the hoarders among us should get help: all mental illness is treatable.
It’s one of those spectrum things. If only done to a slight degree, it’s not a serious problem. We all know someone who is a “pack rat” to some degree. Many of us have a big jar full of loose coins, or a spice rack with more dozens of bottles of spices than we’ll ever use, or a big toolbox full of loose keys, or…
But then you get the nice little old lady who collects magazines about the British Royal Family. Lots of magazines. All the Princess Diana wedding special stuff. Tons of it. Piles of it in every room. Piles of it in the hallway. Piles of it in the kitchen. Barrels of it (literally!) in the backyard, open to the rain… And goes on a shrieking rampage if you talk to her about maybe throwing it out…
Okay, now we’re squarely in the area of mental illness.
So, yes, extreme hoarders are mental. They need professional help, and, by and large, they are of the personality type who resist professional help. “There’s nothing wrong with me; you’re the one who has the problem!”
Sorry it ruined your relationship, but you said it yourself: “He refused to face the fact.” I hope he sees a doctor some time soon; I hope it helps him.
(Hm… My sister only has four cats… And she does change the sand in the cat boxes… Like I said, it’s a spectrum thing…)
Wellllllllllllllllll… maybe.
Lots of the treatments aren’t really effective, and if the individual doesn’t really want to change, the prognosis is not good. Forced treatment is helpful only in very, very select cases.
But if the patient consents and is willing, treatments should be given a chance.
I mostly intend to sit on the sidelines on this one, but please don’t start a pissing contest about who has suffered most in life. Ordinary life can be shit, bipolar adds on top of that, but we have posters who have survived being cut in half or suffer from locked-in syndrome or suffered physical/mental/every other kind of abuse or survived war or…
Well, there’s a lot of suffering in the world. Can we please keep this to just hoarding as mental illness? Thank you.
What do you think of people who hoard paragraph breaks?
There have been two residential fires in this area in the last couple of days that were compounded by severe hoarding within the home. In at least one of them, one of the homeowners (a man in his eighties) died. Firefighters described having to navigate narrow pathways lined with tall stacks of papers.
Yeah, it’s a spectrum thing.
Our family has and loves four cats. The Halloween Fairy deposited a black cat on our driveway about a week before Halloween. She seemed to be a stray, so I checked the lost and found posts, asked the neighbors, etc. She’s a nice kitty, but she was hungry, so we fed her while we were trying to find out whether or not she was just lost.
We took her to the Humane Society last week (after Halloween). It broke our hearts, but really, five cats in one house is at least one cat too many. We wanted to keep her, and she certainly liked us a lot, but I know that at least two of our current feline overlords would have tried to kill her if we let her inside the house…and she wanted to come inside the house.
I miss her, though.
As I’ve mentioned in many threads over the past few weeks, we have Hard Rubbish Collection in my municipality at the moment, and yes indeed, there are some truly MENTAL people out there (myself included of course). 
My daughter is worse than me…and I just thank the stars that she’s moving house in a couple of weeks, so all the stuff she collected off the side of the road (plus shitloads of other ‘stuff’ from her home) ended up in a garage-sale over the weekend. She netted $300, and what didn’t sell went out onto HER naturestrip to be collected by the HRC peeps over the next few days…well, what’s left after scavangers just like us have had a rummage!
I fear for her though. It’s not so much that she’s a hoarder, she just CANNOT drive by a pile of junk on the side of the road without going through it for a squiz. And the new place she’s moving into is BIGGER than her present accommodation, AND it has a double garage and a big garden shed too. So, she’s sort of a hoarder, but claims she’s a hoarder with every intention of making a few $$ from her enterprising ways. A total coverup in my opinion, but anyways…
Well, you’re definitely not a hoarder Rockfox73…you dumped the BF, so nobody can accuse you of having useless stuff hanging around! 
I agree that hoarding is a mental illness. Collectors are even worse because they have living, breathing critters involved in the mix.
My husband is a packrat, but that’s mostly inertia. When I point out that his complete collection of PC gamer mags from 2004 to last year are not really very useful today, he helps me carry them out to the recycle bin.
Tony has always been a hoarder, he carefully folds up the critter food bags and stacks them neatly in case he needs them. Sadly for Tony, he ends up in jail or in the hospital every couple of years so I use that time to clean his place out. He gets pissed off, but he gets over it and then fills all of his living space back up with trash.
Animal collectors…OMG…
As a rescue person, I’ve helped deal with 3 cat collecters. To a person, they were just trying to rescue homeless cats, but they didn’t have the money to get them fixed or vetted. Next thing they knew, they had 20+ sick cats, all peeing all over the place and starving because they couldn’t afford 20 lbs of catfood a day.
To a person, they cried and protested when we went in, pulled the cats out of the walls (enough cat pee will disolve paint and drywall) and took them away to put most of them down. They loved their cats and didn’t understand that what they were doing was so bad.
Cats got put down because they were very sick, not because we weren’t willing to care for them.
How do you feel about shock treatment(s)? 
I’m getting olfactory hallucinations of the stench of cat-pee just from reading this…
It’s sad to the point of tragedy. They think they’re doing good, but really, they’re only doing harm. The cats are sick and underfed and probably a bit psycho from the crowding. It isn’t a nice happy fluffy kitty home; it’s a hell-hole of disease and privation.
Some people have the “blinders on” and somehow manage not to see what is right there in front of their face.
For a what?
Sort of a quizzical squint. Looking things over.