Champions of clutter: the phenomenon of compulsive hoarding

X-treme self storage

One morning in November 2008, and elderly, retired lawyer was found in the hallway outside his flat in South London dozing gently on a stack of old newspapers. Returning from a professional dinner the previous evening, he had found himself unable to enter the property, where he had lived alone in genteel decline for decades. He was unable to get in because the flat was packed to the ceiling with junk, and, in his absence, a pile of old newspapers had toppled against the front door. The stack in the hallway had previously been carefully deposited there by him because there simply had not been enough room for them within.

Relatives came to the rescue, and while he recuperated in hospital, they cleared his flat of 96 black bin bags of rubbish. They feared he would be upset and would treat them like traitors to his cause, but on his return he barely seemed to notice, thanked his rescuers, and promptly began rebuilding his hoard.

It was a mild case. His hoard consisted mainly of old newspapers and magazines — common objects of desire for compulsive hoarders. There were no piles of rotting food, or bags of rubbish hauled in from neighbours’ dustbins, or starving pets, or rats, or accumulations of human faeces (which some very extreme hoarders cannot bring themselves to discard). In really bad cases, the neighbours usually alert the local authority because of the foul smell, or the ever-expanding collections of detritus that spill out into halls and stairways or into the garden. Then the Environmental Health Practitioners (EHPs) are called in.

But it’s always a tricky assignment for the EHPs. There are questions of liberty and privacy: the law is fairly accommodating about what you can keep in your own home. If health and safety issues are at stake, then EHPs can issue a notice under Section 80 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, demanding “abatement of nuisance”. Failure to comply with such a notice can result in an antisocial behaviour order, and ultimately a criminal conviction and prison sentence. But in practice it is hard for the authorities to pursue such a course, as offenders tend to comply just enough to earn a respite. This may involve assistance from the Social Services, and specialist clearance and cleaning agencies, which can cost the public purse between £1500 and £5000 a session.

Tipping the balance from storage to clutter

The real problem is that compulsive hoarding is not so much a question of criminal instincts but a mental disorder. It goes by various names, including “disposaphobia”, “syllogomania”, the “Messie mindset”, “senile squalor syndrome”, and the “Diogenes Syndrome”  (but that is a misnomer, as the Diogenes of the Greek myth was not a hoarder). However, it is not clear whether compulsive hoarding should be classed as a disorder in its own right, or as a symptom of one of a range of other conditions, such as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), schizophrenia, depression, dementia, or some kind of social phobia. The answer is probably that it varies: each case is unique, and has its own causes — and so treatment likewise has to be tailored to the circumstances.

Nonetheless, many of the more extreme examples of compulsive hoarders have common characteristics. They are usually single, middle-aged or elderly, and reclusive. They usually do not recognise their hoarding habit as a problem, and often see it as “collecting”; and they attach a value to what they are collecting — either a delusional monetary value (rarely do such hoards contain anything at all of real value), or some kind of personal, emotional value, or the fixation that things can’t be thrown away because they may “come in useful one day”.

Hoarders — in a class of their own

Britain’s most famous case of compulsive hoarding was Edmund Trebus (1918–2002), who featured in a BBC documentary film series called A Life of Grime. An immigrant of Polish extraction, formerly married and the father of five, he gradually assigned the rooms and floors of his four-storey house in Crouch End, North London, to his “collections” — vacuum cleaners, old cameras, Elvis Presley records, children’s toys, and much else — as one by one his family left. His garden was filled with old building materials and machinery. He roamed the streets with a hand cart collecting ever more junk from skips and secondhand shops, constantly battling with local authority officials who tried to curb his habit. Finally he was reduced to living with his Jack Russell terrier in one corner of his kitchen, which he accessed by means of ladders. When the authorities at last persuaded him to move into a residential home for the elderly a year before he died aged 83, they removed 515 cubic yards of rubbish from his rat-infested home — enough to fill about 17 average-sized self-storage containers of 100 square feet.

But this is modest fare compared to perhaps the world’s most famous case of compulsive hoarding: the Collyer brothers of New York. Homer Collyer (1881–1947) and Langley Collyer (1885–1947) came from a well-to-do family, who moved into a fine brownstone mansion in Harlem, Manhattan, in 1909. After their parents died in the 1920s, Homer and Langley became reclusive, venturing out only in search of food – and junk to pack into their sizeable home. Although wealthy, they became known in the neighbourhood as mean eccentrics, and were targeted by burglars who believed the rumours that the house was full of valuable treasures. This made them even more reclusive, and inspired Langley to spike the house with booby traps of his own invention. After failing to pay their bills, the utility companies cut off their water, gas and electricity. The house decayed. In 1937, Homer’s eyesight began to fail and, as he became blind, he was confined to his bed and an armchair.

In 1947, an anonymous call alerted the police to a death in the house. Failing to gain entry, a police officer broke into an upper floor window, and wormed his way into the house along tunnels through the piles of newspapers and other junk. The smell was terrible. After two hours he reached the emaciated corpse of Homer Collyer, slumped in his armchair. The body was removed but the stench persisted. Langley Collyer remained unaccounted for. The authorities began emptying the house (now condemned as physically unstable) of its rubbish — 130 tons of it in all. Langley’s body was eventually found after nearly three weeks, lying buried beneath a deep pile of newspapers just 10 feet from where Homer had died. He had been caught in one of his own booby traps while bringing food to his brother, who had then starved to death.

Tabloid horror

In the past, compulsive hoarding might have been explained as an extreme expression of a culture of “make and mend”, when everything has a potential value until all possibilities of repair or adapted use are exhausted. But there is no sign that compulsive hoarding is abating, even in our modern “throw-away” culture. On the contrary, the proliferation of cheap consumer goods, and our casual habits of disposal, make the hoarder’s lust for acquisition easier to feed. Compulsive hoarding is said to affect 1–2% of people in the UK: that amounts to maybe two or three households in every urban street.

The public remains fascinated by the excesses. A Swiss documentary film called “Seven dumpsters and a Corpse”, by Thomas Haemmerli, gained something of a cult following after it was released in 2007(www.messiemother.com/film). A new series of TV films called “Hoarders” (A&E cable network) is currently being aired in the US (2009-10), examining chronic hoarders (www.aetv.com/hoarders).

In truth, most of us have some kind of hoarding instinct: we are all on the “hoarding spectrum”. That may explain our fascination for extreme cases. Most of us also have an instinct — however deeply buried — to declutter from time to time. This may result in us turning to self storage to clear the home. But your alarm bells should ring if you start filling your rented self storage with worthless junk and bric-a-brac — or piles of old newspapers.

4 Responses to “Champions of clutter: the phenomenon of compulsive hoarding”

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4. Antony says:

   November 13, 2012 at 2:21 pm

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