How should I respond to the hoarding?

Annonymously APS (Adult Protective Services) and tell them that there are two vulnerable elders living in a filthy, unsafe hoarded home. Also contact the local police where your parents live and ask them to do wellness checks. They will see the conditions and then the state will force services and outside help on them, or they both get placed against their will for their own safety.
I always say nothing gets an elder a one-way ticket to a nursing home faster than being stubborn.

Call Adult Protective Services immediately.

I would also call your local police non-emergency number for a wellness check on your dad.

Have you ever watched the tv show Hoarders? Yes, I would say hoarding is an psychological crutch.

Rotting food that they could possibly eat? This must stop immediately. They’re both mentally ill and need to be removed from that house. Start there. As far as preserving the relationship, the relationship you once had is gone. You’re their protector now and that is your priority.

I'm sure this will be really hard for you to do but I agree that you need to call APS and get them the help they really need. This is unsafe and disgusting. There is no way your mom can be providing appropriate care to your dad. I would pretend to be ignorant about why APS is coming to the house. Take a deep breath and make the call to help your parents be safe.

I have a sibling who’s a hoarder. Trust me, it won’t get better. Please look out for your dad and report the situation to APS, he deserves a safe environment

At present you are at the sidelines. Your folks are living the way they choose to. Well Mom is. What about Dad? Do you think he has capacity to choose for himself? Would he choose 'together' over 'safe'?

The risks here are Mom's lack of self-care can keep sliding. This will slide/has already slid into lack of care for Dad.

Whether this is self-neglect & elder neglect already I can't say. But I would report my concerns to 'authorities' someone who could assess & advise.

At what point will you decide to involve non-family do you think?

A temporary guardianship may be required to get them both housed safely again.

Sorry but APS won't do anything. As long as she is of "sound" mind she can unfortunately live in filth. You may have better luck with the health department if there is no accessible toilet or running water.

I just googled what I could from our Human Services Dept (I'm not US) out of curiousity. A rating for hoarding (clutter) & squalor (living standards) is reported. Referrals are made to different services as required. Followup visits & reports made.

A flowchart provides which other services will be involved after the initial contact.

Eg child/elder/animal neglect/abuse to relevant child/elder/animal Welfare Depts. Vermin/pests to Health Dept. Lack of pathways & hoarding of flammable materials to Fire Dept - smoke alarms can be mandated.

Mental health concerns can be escalated to Psychiatric Triage.

I believe Psychiatric triage covers a wide range, mental illness but also including any apparent lack of reasoning.

This is where undiagnosed cognitive decline, dementia would fall.

The OP's Dad has dx dementia. There would need to be some assessment of her Mom's abilities to declide the next steps.

It may be plain overwhelm. With some help to decide differently, Mom could accept help & stay in her home - with more home services/cleaning/personal care help for Dad. Or be assessed for & treated for depression. Or of she has some cog decline, this be assessed fully.

However, the alternative is to skip all that. Skip this step.

Just wait until an actual crises happens to force change. This is a valid choice. But it may have serious, or even life threatening consequences.

You say that “the neighbors probably wonder why I don’t do more to help”. Could you have a heart-felt discussion with a neighbor about the ‘rotting food’ etc, and explain how you feel that you can’t report it because your mother would never speak to you again. Perhaps ask the neighbor to help you with something inside, so that they see for themselves. Don’t ask the neighbor to report, but hope that it works. Mother may be fairly sharp, but you can honestly say that it wasn’t you.

Could someone else call APS? Or, you call and then if your mom guesses it was you, that could be the time for a therapeutic fib. “ Gosh I don’t know who called, mom, maybe it was a concerned blah blah blah…”

I get not wanting even more drama on top of drama.

There’s nothing you can do with a hoarders’ stuff until after they’re gone - they won’t budge on that. I grew up with hoarding - not the worst, but still, 6 storage units later, etc…etc…even great grandmother’s and receipts were considered precious boxes.

Big hug and good luck!

I'm so sorry you're dealing with this. You are most assuredly not alone in the 'hoarder' dynamic. My mom, who passed in August, was a 'clean' hoarder, but a hoarder nonetheless.

I tried, tried, tried to 'help' her. She actually asked for my help a couple of times. But all efforts to clean were met with pushback and I finally told her if she was just going to paw through the trashcans at night to find something I'd thrown out--there was no point to my 'help'. 3 long days of work and we'd thrown out essentially nothing.

Hoarding is most definitely a mental disorder. We see garbage and junk and they see precious items, or food that's 'just barely' out of date. Mom's place was completely covered in a fine layer of dust and bird feathers.

After she died, YB (she lived with his family) went crazy and in 2 days had emptied her place and made several runs to the dump and to the local GoodWill. It was so weird, but it's what he had to do to deal with his grief and anger (yes, I said anger--). After he had sorted and gone through everything, he calmed down. We other sibs helped, but watching him frantically just throwings things was quite unsettling.

The apartment sits basically empty now--except for those gross birds, which he'll NEVER rehome. (Guilt, I think).

Calling APS will get your mom & dad in the system. Standards are pretty darn low as to what they will and won't call 'acceptable'. I called on a 'friend' who had the cat litter box in the kitchen with litter and feces spread out across the floor. The dogs had peed everywhere. Clothes, food, junk piled waist high throughout the house.

APS deemed it liveable. I don't even think there was a follow up. I was only one of many who called. Nothing ever changed.

In your case, where dad cannot see where he's walking, maybe APS will make a more concerted effort to help. IDK. You can only try and then see what happens. Thsi is very dangerous for your dad--he needs a clear pathway to walk through--and with hoarders, that changes from day to day.

Sadly, no attention is really paid to this problem until someone gets seriously hurt. I hope you can avoid that!

Newmilton,

With the hoarding at such a dangerous level for both of them, I'd urge you to APS yourself and then you're not the target of her angst. The hoarding means that in any emergency (and those caused by the piles), the EMT's would be hard-pressed to retrieve them from the home.

If you're DPOA, you're responsible for the preservation of their assets and the weight of hoarding plus the "rotting food" and etc., is destroying what may be the sole asset for providing them with the facility care that they certainly now require. They are not safe and you can't continue to enable this unhealthy and dangerous living situation.

If you can find seasons of 'Hoarders,' please watch a few episodes and it will give you a better understanding of the resistance in hoarders and the severe extent to which it destroys dwellings, too often allowing rodent egress and other unhealthy pests.

Relieve yourself and them of this terrible burden and report the situation to APs, it's the only responsible thing to do, you cannot allow your mom's decisions and choices to reign in this dangerous situation.

After reading further: talk with your absent sibling and have her do the reporting. Fully appraise your sib of the conditions with pictures and ask this one thing of her. Then you can honestly tell your mom that you didn't report the home and hopefully, retain the trust. But trust is less important than their safety, no matter what.

Wishing you and yours the best moving forward.

Hoarding is a mental illness and you should not expend any energy "helping" your Mom without the insights and guidance of a therapist who specializes in this disorder. You are correct that your Mom would not see the therapist, but you can.

If you do nothing, eventually one or both of them will either be taken out by ambulance and the other will shortly follow.

If you report them to APS, the county will probably dictate what happens (if they gain guardianship or your Mom gets written up for neglect or abuse of your Dad). Your Dad most likely would be removed to a Medicaid facility by the guardian. Not sure what will happen to your Mom but the township may insist she clean up her home or get a citation. It differs by state/county. She won't clean it up and neither should you.

None of the scenarios have a pleasant outcome. It's a matter of choosing a "least bad" option. I wish you much wisdom and peace in your heart as you work through this.

My parents were severe hoarders. It is a mental illness and I want you to save yourself from thinking you can change the behavior.

I actually got a social worker involved and she could only make my Mom clear a 3 foot path down the hall to Dads room.

there was so much stuff in their home that mice overtook the house and there was a huge infestation.

I got the pleasure of cleaning the house out when they moved near me to assisted living. It took an estate sales person a junk company and eventually Serve-pro to decontaminate the house. We worked for weeks to get it all sorted, a large industrial bun was in the driveway and it was filled 3 times and taken to the dump.

it is hard not to worry but this is not something you can fix.

I would call APS and hopefully they will follow through with taking action.

I can’t stand clutter. Hoarding is so much worse than ordinary clutter.

I am so sorry that you are dealing with this difficult situation.

I have dealt with a somewhat similar situation over the last decade. The most important advice I can give you is to temper your expectations. Hoarding is a complex health challenge and neither you nor I nor any health-care professional has a lot to offer in terms of treatment and management. It is poorly understood, and although there are some individuals who improve with CBT and supportive household help, I think it is very difficult for the elderly to find motivation for treatment. They are often not well enough (cognitively or mentally) to engage with treatment at all.

The most useful thing you can do is seek help for yourself. I think most people dealing with hoarding/caregiving require assistance to maintain some balance in their lives. That might be building a network of supportive friends, or talking to a religious advisor, or therapist. A mental health professional may be more familiar with the illness, and will not waste your time with well-intentioned but naive suggestions. This next phase of family life is hard. You need to build strong boundaries and make sure you preserve your health, work, and relationships.

I don’t have any direct experience with Adult Protective Services, so I cannot speak to their utility.

I would recommend taking a few photos sometime when you visit. Document unsafe conditions (images + time, date) to establish evidence of unsafe conditions in the home. I’d probably do this surreptitiously, given the situation you describe and your father’s vulnerability in the home.

At some point, an opportunity will arise when you feel it is right to call attention to conditions in the home. I can’t say when that will be—every situation is different, every family is different. In the US, a hospital admission is one opportunity. If your father were admitted, a discharge planner will visit prior to his release. The trick is, you have to be there to meet with that person, and indicate that conditions in the home are unsafe. These meetings seem to be impromptu (planner just shows up with no warning). Don’t miss it, if you can help it—or reach out to the discharge planning group proactively. If you have photos on your phone, you can show them the home is unsafe. In a functional hospital, that would start wheels turning for an alternate placement for your dad. You could also communicate your doubts about your mom’s capabilities as caretaker, but that is harder to argue. And it may be futile, if your mom is currently designated as his legal caretaker.

An alternate route involves communicating with the primary physician. This is what I did, after another vulnerable individual who lived in the home was hospitalized. I was very blunt and indicated that my mom could no longer maintain safe conditions in the home due to hoarding issues and cognitive decline, and that the health and well-being of my other relative was in jeopardy. A good physician will have contacts with a competent social service provider and write a referral for evaluation and services of some kind.

There is probably no way to avoid a confrontation. After I called the doctor’s office, the nurse called my mom (while I was sitting at the kitchen table with her) and reported exactly what I had said. My mom was beyond livid.

If/when you decide to report unsafe conditions, be prepared for the fact that you cannot control your mom’s reaction to the report. She may or may not get over it. It may rupture your relationship with her, or with both parents. So you and only you can know what makes sense. Make sure all legal documents are in order, if you can.

In my case, the report resulted in an in-home visit and some services (a weekly visit from a geriatric social worker) that helped somewhat. Not really a solution, as conditions overall continued to decline, but it did help. We slowly started to build connections to care services for the elderly. Today (about 8 years later), my mom is in AL and continues to hoard. So: get help for yourself, first.

My brother has always been a hoarder and has been diagnosed with severe bipolar. It's one of the characteristics of that mental problem. He's only gotten worse over the years but now is in a nursing home and unfortunately, will likely die there. Even in the nursing home he tries to hoard but he has very little room.

You absolutely have all of my empathy. My mom is 64, I’m 43. She began hoarding decades ago after becoming an empty nester once my brother and I were out of the house.

This year she had a stroke that left her paralyzed on the left. This was just weeks after finally being put out of her house that she’d squatted in illegally for over 3 years because she foreclosed on it and didn’t tell anyone, and it took that long for it to come to light to me..by the time it did the new owner came knocking on her door and calling me to get her out.

I don’t have much advice to offer. This is a horrible horrible thing to see someone decline in this way. I am so sorry you are going through this. I too have a sibling..just before my moms stroke when I asked them for help because she was being put out of the home they politely told me not to ever contact them again about our mom as they wouldn’t answer. And they haven’t despite my attempts about her stroke so they meant that. I think it’s healthy to find a way to forgive your sibling. Else it can come back to you down the road and eat you alive that you have a blood relative that close in relation to you that has chosen to leave you alone in all of this. On one hand it’s just not right. On the other hand it’s very possible they have valid reasons for disassociating. Either way, finding a path towards forgiveness is important.

As far as the hoarding, I haven’t read the whole thread yet but I wonder are you prepared for say, your parents being ‘put out’ of where they live? In other words, who handles all of the stuff in the house then? That is a hugely stressful event and could require a ton of money and several hands to help just to figure out getting the stuff out. Or thrown away. Or whatever.

My mother didn’t have running water for decades. I made the decision that I couldn’t be the one to save her stuff. There wasn’t any plan I could think of to ‘go through everything in her house’ and salvage stuff with her that wouldn’t stress me to an unhealthy point. So I let her be. The day she was technically ‘evicted’ I went over and spent maybe 4 hours getting photos and documents out. Mind you, the house was still completely hoarded despite her having legally lost it 3 years prior meaning she had that much time to get all the important stuff out and couldn’t/didn’t.

If you’re going to be the one dealing with everything in that house alone with someone who is going to fight you because they don’t want you touching a thing and they’re mad because you’re the reason they might have to part with some of their things, I wonder what your plan is for that. By my story, you can see I basically ‘opted out’. My mom retrieved some stuff but at the end of the day she left a house that was filled and I mean filled with things that the new owner came in and had a crew throw away. It devastated my mom and she is somehow mad at me for much of it (!). Unfortunately, she now has a much bigger issue (her life changing stroke), so the whole house/hoarding thing does not get raised (to me anyway, she’s been chatty enough to her NPD trauma-bonded sister to tell her how much she’s mad at me..for what reason I don’t know).

Again, you have my utmost empathy. I am so sorry you are going through this. I just wonder what happens to this stuff if the parents have to go. That’s a huge thing to have to deal with and in the hoarder’s eyes you will likely be the enemy that is trying to take away their stuff the more involved you are IMO. Best to recognize this ‘will’ likely impact the relationship with your mom to some kind of extent..and that that’s ok because this is an illness and none, absolutely none of this is your fault. I haven’t been in this forum long but feel free to chat me anytime if you need someone to talk to. My thoughts are with you and your family.

I get it, I really do. This is one of the harder points of having to wrest control from your parents. Loss, heartbreak and anger are looming out of every corner. The situation you describe is not going to get better. Without intervention, it will only get worse. And without intervention, you could
easily lose both your parents to a fire, illness, vermin; the list goes on. Google services for the elderly in your area. Call Adult Protective Services, and set an appointment to go talk to them. They may be able to given you advice on how to do this. Please believe me, intervention is necessary right now. Your Mom may be having mental or physical challenges that aside from the hoarding may not be obvious. Losing Moms trust feels awful, but this pales in comparison to the other potential losses. I’ve seen and worked with bad hoarder situations. The most
loving thing you can do for your parents is to intervene.

Call adult protective services…your Dad needs to be rescued. My mom slowly began “stockpiling” necessities. She had enough shampoo, paper products etc that 3 yrs later we are still using it. She even tries to do this at her AL facility. I can control that more easily now that I am in charge of finances. My mom {89} was a clean neat hoarder. I see the same tendencies in my 51 yr old daughter! This issue runs in families and is a mental illness. Mom also had anxiety and depression. Good luck

My Mom is a hoarder too but not too bad in the refrigerator. I have had to go in and throw stuff out from time to time but fortunately she does not get upset. I live with her so am aware of her food situation. My sister-in-law comes by every Tuesday and will comment if she smells something bad in the refrigerator. I think, because of Mom's pride, she will relent and clean out the refrigerator. Maybe if your Mom has a friend you could bring her in and ask her to make a comment about smelling something bad in the fridge. Maybe your Mom will be embarrassed and do something about it. As far as the other hoarding goes, I tried for years to get Mom to get rid of stuff in her den and work room. I finally gave up. I'm letting her enjoy her stuff and will deal with it when she passes. I think it is very hard to get rid of things when you are old. These are her memories of a life well lived and she deserves to have them as long as they are not trip or safety hazards.

One reader said to obtain a professional who specializes in hoarding. I agree.

I'm sorry that you have to go through your mother's "Pack Rat" problem that includes dirty, rotting food to make your parents' house a stinking part of their town. Very extreme mental disorder that your mother considers a "Don't You Dare Touch My Stuff" as normal to her.

Make an anonymous contact with APS so your mother does not get mad at you.

My gosh, I like to collect trinkets myself with my autism disorder but not anything compared with what a hoarder does. I like neatness and order I want no one to touch.

My in-laws hoarded but different things. My FIL never threw away an important paper and had taxes and other papers going back to the 1960s. My MIL likes to shop and had cleaning products, the same outfit in a rainbow of colors, more shoes than Imelda Marcos, a bedstead still in its box, and boxes full of curtains, clothes and sun dries piled to the ceiling throughout the house. The light bulbs burned out in light fixtures and were not replaced. The corridors were tightly packed with narrow aisles. The floors were covered with dog feces and urine and the kitchen was disgusting. One toilet didn’t work and the other was unstable.

My FIL fell in the hallway & couldn’t get up. It took my MIL a couple of days to call 911 since it was difficult to reach the only working phone. My husband only found out through his cousin that this happened and left immediately to help. He couldn’t stay in the house because it was so bad.

After FIL passed, MIL remained in the home which was a bad idea. She has bipolar, is the hoarder the beginnings of dementia and has delusions and hallucinations and a dog that isn’t house trained. She refused to demonstrate that she could drive. She drove for the first time in 2 years after we left & got lost. It took 4 hours for her to find her way home.

DH’s cousin would grocery shop for her. She would call the police saying people were trying to break into the house to rape her or steal her dog. The police were called so frequently that she would have been taken in for a mental evaluation if not moved to assisted living.

Now in assisted living, she feels that she was railroaded into the facility without her consent. She wanted to live with us. MIl refused to hear that she was not welcome to live in our house with her dog. Try he dog would have to go. She is unwilling to give it up.

Once she moved out of her house, and since DH has POA, I cleaned up her house, arranged to have the yard maintained over the summer, made a list of what needed to be done that I couldn’t do and provided the list to my husband as well as a good source for the solution. I also gave a timeframe I wanted it completed, because I never wanted to go back there again.

The house sold in December 2021. DH was thrilled and so was I. That was 6 months of hard work for me and about 3 for my husband on the house. He still deals with his mother but there is little interaction. She is 3.5 hours away and she has the same complaints- I am hungry and don’t like the food, the dog is dying (nothing wrong with the dog), I want to live near you, etc. Her funds will go further where she is- not where we are.

There are companies that will help clean up hoarder houses. I did use one at the end to remove the nasty furniture and carpet. One must be careful to keep the dumpster around only a short time to discourage dumpster divers.

Can you get your sibling in to help you do a tiny intervention? If you can at least clean out the kitchen which is a terrible health hazard and breeding ground for roaches and mice, it would be a good start. You and sibling must be a united front. That said, Hoarding is a coping mechanism that needs professional expertise. It may not be addressed until there is an emergency health situation that forces a change. I’m sending you a big virtual hug because I can feel your sadness and helplessness - most important to try to take care of yourself as best as you can.

My instinctual take on your mom's hoarding is that she is 'pre-grieving', facing a coming loss as your father declines toward passing away. She seems to be trying to shore up what she can see and touch, so I agree that this is a 'crutch' but also a symbol of trying desperately to 'hold on'. I had a friend with rabid hoarding impulses to the point neither she nor her husband could even sit down anywhere in their own home except a dining room chair, after somebody moved the 'stuff' off the chair; from an eagle's eye perspective it was heartbreakingly obvious this friend felt 'empty' inside; in art history there's a term for filling up every possible space: 'horror vacui'...fear of having or leaving empty space. Of course this prevents anything truly 'new' coming in: too scary, instead of a sense of 'possibility' (future.) My friend would hire me now and then to help tackle her hoard; I witnessed her lift a box of 'stuff' as if to relocate it to then only turn around and Set It Back Down Behind Her, literally Blocking Her Own Path! Your mom's excuse that she can't clean/organize/simplify is due to caring for husband is a dodge, showing on some level she has no sense of identity beyond wife/caregiver. It's heartbreaking, but hopefully she can get the support she needs to be 'there' for both your father and herself; their relationship has changed, her husband is now a 'dependent', she will need a more solid sense of self if your father dies before her. All the Best.

Hello Newmilton, first off my heart goes out to you. I leaned on this forum a lot when I needed the help but have rarely replied since, maybe because it brings back bad memories of what I went through. Your situation sounds a lot like mine previously and I wanted to help. In a nutshell, what helped me most is hiring a geriatric care manager. Start at this link. https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/what-geriatric-care-manager

The person I hired probably saved my own life by helping to share the stress. I didn’t realize this at the time but I needed the support (mentally more than anything) to get through the tough decisions. My Mom is now in a nursing home with severe dementia. Not the the life I wanted for her as she aged but the key is that she is safe and always looked after.

I could share many more details so please feel free to reach out. I’m happy to help you the best I can. Tackling this alone is not the answer. You need a team (at least a teammate) and for me that was my geriatric care manager.

Good luck! It won’t be easy but you will get through this!

There are no easy answers to this problem. My 92-year-old father-in-law lives in assisted living and is a compulsive catalog shopper. The facility requires him to keep a clear path for getting around safely with his walker, but his 2-bedroom apartment has a growing collection of cardboard boxes and cheap, unneeded junk piled in various nooks and crannies as purchases arrive and he has no place to put it all. He will not relinquish his credit card, but his cognitive skills are declining rapidly and he probably won't be able to remember how to place orders soon enough. My husband is not ready to stop the insanity by seeking legal guardianship because it would ruin his relationship with his controlling father. What a weird and sad way to live his final years.

My mom , who is now 92 , hoarded her whole life. My father would throw everything out and their house was livable. After dad died the hoarding picked up massively . It wasn’t as bad as not being able to walk into a room but when it came time to move my mom with me , I found a whole attic of “stuff “ I had to clean out that took me a whole year to do since I am an only child . Now mom isn’t driving so the hoarding is comprised of napkins , toilet paper and wrappers …. I trust once mom stops driving it will die down., she then won’t be able to gather more stuff to hoard . You just have to take a bag or two of stuff every time you go over and when she’s not looking putting them in your trunk to go and dump. Day by day , bag by bag you can decrease the clutter . But be careful to not let her notice she will go ballistic, all has to be done undercover for her not to notice . Good luck !

I had a similar situation with my mother. The hoarding started 10 or 15 years ago. She ordered stuff from QVC and HSN--huge amounts. Multiples of items. Her house became filled up with boxes she never opened, and opened boxes with stuff spilled out, empty boxes and packaging everywhere. She also had a few stores in town she'd go to where she'd spend hundreds of dollars and then just leave the purchases in her car trunk, or dump them somewhere in the house. It got so you could hardly get in the front door, and every room was filled with a mountain of brand new, sometimes expensive items.

As a family we were very concerned and tried to stage a couple of "interventions" but nothing seemed to get through to her. We worried about her financial situation. She was not rich, living off social security and my dad's pension. It later turned out that she had taken out a reverse mortgage on the house and spent it all. But that is a whole other, very sad, story for our family.

My mom seemed very depressed during all this and would spend all day and night lying in her chair surrounded by mountains of junk. I finally had a sort of epiphany one day. I was convinced that she was in trouble and needed help, but in my mind she would never start to get better while living in that house with all that junk. It had to be dealt with.

So I started cleaning it up. I had to promise her not to get rid of anything, but she pretty much left me to it otherwise. Sometimes I tried to involve her by unpacking purchases and looking at them with her and we had some nice mother-daughter times. I started small, with just one room (it is a large house) and organized and moved stuff until that room was clear. I went room by room, moving stuff around like one of those car parking games. I had her purchase a (second) shed and once I had that, I had a place to put everything to get it out of the house.

Long story short, working nights and weekends, in about a year I got the house back to normal. I felt enormous relief and a sense of accomplishment mixed with a huge amount of anger at what she had done, how much money she had spent and her obliviousness to what she had done. I now believe that this hoarding was a precursor to her dementia. A few years later she was diagnosed with dementia, probably vascular caused by her out of control diabetes. And then 5 years ago I moved in with her to take care of her.

And here I am, able to live here because I cleaned it up myself years ago. But still hanging over me are the masses of stuff outside in the garage and 2 large sheds. We've purged some of it over time, but it's a huge task and one I don't have energy for anymore with all my caregiving duties. I dread the day Mom either passes away or has to move to a NH, for that is when the reverse mortgage comes due, and everything must be dealt with.