Kathleen15 is a spammer.

And a big fat liar.

I bet she totally is fat, too.

Thanks for the delete on that spammer MSN....you should get to the MSN Money pages..they totally rule there.

Why not? If family has been notified they release anyone's name?

He's dead. He won't care anymore. No embarrassment for him.

The reason it's becoming more common is obvious to me. People accumulate stuff with age. With more old people there are more years to accumulate big piles of junk. I knew a very nice psychiatrist who developed this problem after 70. He lived to 92. One weekend he was gone and I went in and cleaned out his room. It was straight out of a movie. Tons of junk. Tossed most of it. Vacuumed the place, got everything clean.

He was so mad at me! But, he didn't go back to his piling up ways after that.

Ellen - Who gave you permission to enter his home and toss his possessions? How he chooses to live is none of your business. He has every right to be mad at you. If he didn't give his permission, then he should have called law enforcement on you.

+1 ABCzyx

Ellen- your armchair phychiatry is wrong. Hoarding is not an age issue, it's a mental health issue.

There are young hoarders. Hoarding isn't about gramdma's years of accumulated knicknacks, it's about a compulsive disorder that prevent the victim from being able to throw away anything at all, even trash.

Many of these hoarders accumulate without long-term thought as to what is useful and how it is useful. Some even hoard bags and bottles containing their own waste. You can't ascribe everything to the depression mentality, very often it is psychological depression. Deaths in the family or estrangement will do it.

A 67 year old will not have lived the Depression. And there are younger hoarders than that that were perfectly normal up until an incident that sends them over the edge.

First instinct is to say today's hoarders are the result of the Great Depression. I disagree. My parents were Depression Kids that grew up as Pack Rats. I definitely understand their reasoning for keeping and reusing items; however, today's hoarders have deep emotional issues that appear to be the result of a sudden tragedy or relationship abuse.

I have had relatives from the Great Depression, and they were mostly very different. My one relative still alive from that era is my great uncle who actually believe it or not is the son of a Civil War Veteran, and definitely not a pack rat.

No matter how someone gets to be a hoarder, it is a disease, and whether or not the hoarder wants help, they need it. If we do nothing, we risk this happening. At the very least, maybe we could use fire codes to force help on those unwilling to accept it. That guy wanted to live in trash, but had he had more help from his family and the community, maybe this would have been different.

Or, we could just let those who horde to themselves then either laugh or feel sorry for how everything turned out.

Yeah. My mom and dad were depression kids. They were always very frugal and saved stuff, lots of it. But they were also very organized. My dad would go out and organize the barn several times a year. He'd move stuff around, look for damage, putter with stuff. He'd throw things out, or more likely donate them if he thought they were never going to be used again. But that barn had a whole lot of stuff in it. It took him weeks to go through it each time. Kept him busy, like his fix-it projects around the place.

And my mom had a whole room full of fabric scraps downstairs. But she had a system, by color, size, etc. She had shelves and bins for everything. She quilted for many years and she used those scraps. There must have been 10,000 scraps of cloth in that room. And I think she remembered where she had put each one until the day she died at 80. She would be quilting and frown, then say, "I know just the thing for this." She would go downstairs, root around and come back in about 10 minutes with the scrap she had been thinking of, then cut it and quilt it into her pattern.

And she had a fire extinguisher at the entrance of the room and another on the stairs in case the scraps caught fire.

There's a big difference between saving things out of frugality and just hoarding.

Ellen- Very cool story. Your Mom sounded very cool indeed! A artist to boot. Having been around them all my life I can say they live a life of organized clutter.

I disagree about hoarders being only Depression Kids. My moms parents both died when she was 13. The family packed her and her brother off to foster homes (both had been adopted as well) and my mom was told she couldn't take anything from the house, because it wasn't really her stuff.

Thankfully, she had a nice cousin who gave her a few things of her parents. My mom definitely is a hoarder. Things only got worse after my step dad passed away and his sisters came in to the house and took all of his Navy pictures and a lot of personal items without my moms knowledge or my knowledge. They also threw out a bunch of paperwork, and we have no idea what they threw out.

Just growing up in that environment, I'm a pack rat. It's natural to me.

There is a big difference in making the most of what you have available, compared to living a substandard life because of an inability to throw things away. I can tell you firsthand that this has nothing to do with the Great Depression, or any mentality even remotely related.

my,aren't we tolerant of sick people?

If you don't like it, then don't go into their homes. Who are you to judge? There are other things that make a fireman's job difficult, such as vicious dogs.

ABCzyx, we have fire codes for a reason. We all do not just live in a bubble not affecting anyone else. Things that make fireman's jobs too dangerous are often included in fire codes. If it is not in the code and it puts a fireman's life at risk, then they of course should not go in. But if this type of thing happens enough, then it should be included in the fire code. It is the person's house, but it is also a fire hazard to the whole neighborhood. Just because I might live next to a hoarder does not mean that my home should be at greater risk.

You would ignore this man's sickness and deny fireman's and neighbor's rights to safety. Personal liberties can only go so far. When they start affecting others, it is no longer personal liberty. It is someone taking advantage of others.

On one of the TV shows about hoarding, there was a man who left a burner lit on his gas stove all the time. There was junk piled up around the stove - just a fire waiting to happen. That's putting his neighbors at risk, too. His right to live as he wants in his own home ends where it affects the safety of others' homes.

Obviously you know nothing about OCD and compulsive hoarding disorder. It's a mental illness, not just a person being lazy. They don't see things the way an average person would and the attachment to the objects they hoarde is often very strong. That's why most hoarders need a lot of help and continued after care to treat their condition.

What does amassing objects/stuff have to do with letting food rot in open sight, feet high piles of garbage, live and dead animals and insects throughout the home? Not everyone with hoarding problems live in filth. Thats why I think there are 2 issues that need to be addressed separately.

I think the ones that have filth have OCD with depression, also. They look at it and don't know what to do or where to start so they tune out completely and focus on TV, books, the internet. It's an avoidant behavior issue. People with OCD are perfectionists and they feel like if they can't do it all at once and perfectly, then they won't do it at all. It's easy to just sit and say, "They're just lazy" but there's an underlying problem that lead to being that way and it's obviously a psychological issue that they need help with. Try to have some compassion; they're ill.

It's sad to see. This is why some people shouldn't be living alone or in their own homes, especially if they lack the energy and motivation to keep them in good shape.

Where did you hear that half of the Hoarders episodes were taped in the Pacific Northwest? Cite a source for your claims, please.

BTW, that should be fourth, not "forth".

Thank you spelling Nazi. Go back and watch the first few episodes of Hoarders and you'll see a bunch of them in Washington. Maybe it's not half, but its up there. Now stop causing arguments in the blogs and go color in a corner somewhere.

Ethelouise - tell you family that it is none of their business how you keep your house.

I agree. The other thing that gets me riled is the consult or get a lawyer advice. How many Americans can afford that? Most of us cannot afford justice. It is only for the wealthy.

It depends on the hoarder. Some hoarders hoard junk and useless paper and make huge nasty piles of stuff around their house. Some hoarders hoard collections (like doll collections) and let it get way out of hand, but keep it organized (but there's just so much that it overwhelms the house). Not all hoarders are disorganized, they just place extreme value on stuff most of us could throw out without a second thought.

No one said that hoarders are the custodians of collectibles, and hoarding is not in someone's DNA. It is a learned behavior or the result of trauma. It's a mental illness just like many other mental illnesses, and has nothing to do with having lived through the Great Depression or being a Baby Boomer.

Can tell that "nascarlifer" is clueless! Why do I say that? Because it doesn't take a lot of sense to sit and watch cars go round and round and round,etc. Talk about a waste of sperm.... are you a child or just a childish wannabe adult? Can tell you really don't have a handle on anything like OCD or it's associated problems. You only can say smart a$$ comments! 'nuff said to and about THIS loser!

Thank you. It's professionals like you that can help the rest of us better understand those folks problems. Keep up the great work!

Purple California --

Re: It is very painful for them to make a decision to throw something away. ...Hoarding is a very real problem that is NOT easily overcome. For all of you posters that say just throw that crap away, you are clueless and make yourself look stupid.

Truer words were never spoken. I hope your statement helps people realize there's much more to hoarding than meets the eye. Thanks from the bottom of my heart.

Because you're the only person who grew up poor. My gods. What a revelation.

Fantastic trolling you did there.

Daniel,

Hoarding has nothing to do with not being able to afford another one. Hoarders keep things like empty hamburger wrappers and rocks they pick up in the yard. My husband was a moderate hoarder until he got psychiatric help for his anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorders. He started keeping things that made sense, like every magazine he ever owned, then he started collecting pamphlets, even wet nasty ones off of the street, then he started keeping every tab off of every can he came across; I had to pull him away from trash cans if there were cans in them because he would be compelled to dig through to get the tabs. Eventually both of our guest rooms were so filled with piles of junk that there was one path through each so that he could "get to" the things he "needed". He kept every broken electronic item we ever had, VCR's that no longer worked, a walkman that had been dropped and cracked, our original mobile phones that are bigger than a standard cordless today. He even started keeping used wrapping paper, tissue paper and bows from gifts, not to reuse but to remind him of the gift. The one we fought about the most was his bottle collection. He collected all bottles; empty 2 liter soda bottles, beer bottles, ketchup bottles. It wasn't like they were interesting or unique. He had hundreds of empty coke bottles, the beer bottles were for standard beers like bud or coors light (and we don't drink, he would find them). I am thankful every day that he finally sought medical assistance. It has been a year and we have cleaned all of his junk out of the house, set up one of the spare rooms as an actual guest bedroom and were even able to have family come stay with us.

Keeping something because you cannot afford to replace it is normal, frugal behavior that typically will not cause you to die in an avalanche of burning garbage, you do not have 13 broken toasters, you have one not so great toaster that you actually use. You don't keep shoes that the dog chewed beyond wearing or that have holes in the toes, you keep shoes that are little worn out but still functional and you wear them. That is being cautious with your money. Hoarding is keeping things that even the biggest cheapskate in the world would throw out or at least sell for scrap. Even rich people can be OCD enough to be hoarders.