How is Hoarding a Mental Illness?

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Hoarding is the persistent reluctance in discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of their value. This behavior usually has harmful effects - emotional, physical, social, financial, and several times even legal - for a hoarder and family members. Commonly hoarded items can be newspapers, furniture, clothes, household supplies and even food items. There are cases when a house is filled with so many pets that they’re often left uncleaned and uncared for and subsequently, they fall ill.

Hoarding is considered to be a derivative of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). It is reckoned that about one in four people with OCD are also compulsive hoarders. In future, hoarding might be in a league of its own. In the meantime, it is a serious issue and people are opening up about the difficulty and problems hoarding causes them in their lives. It can be difficult to determine if someone is a hoarder or if they just like to hang on to things. One of the main determining factors to identify if it becomes a disorder is to know, whether or not, and to what extent, 
the behavior has started negatively affecting daily functioning.

Here are some of the recognized symptoms of hoarding:

• Cluttered living spaces
• Unable to discard items, regardless of their value
• Keeping stacks of newspapers, magazines, boxes or junk mail
• Shifting items from one pile to another without essentially discarding anything, even the things that need to be thrown out
• Acquiring unnecessary or useless items, including trash
• Difficulty in doing the daily activities, procrastinating and having a hard time making decisions
• Difficulty organizing items
• Perfectionism - Expecting everything to be flawless
• Over-attachment to possessions and experiencing discomfort when someone else touches or borrows belongings
• Limited or no social interactions

Reasons for hoarding:

People tend to hoard because they believe that the item will come in use in the future and hold it dear to themselves with a unique sentimental value to them. Sometimes they also consider the item as a memory of a person or an event, thinking that they will not remember the event without the item. Hoarding often causes anger, resentment, and depression among family members, and it can have a great effect on the social development of children. Unliveable conditions may lead to separation between couples or divorce, eviction from the property, even loss of child custody, and can give rise to some serious financial problems.

If you are in need of a hoarding clean-up, Bio Cleanse services is who you should contact. Our years of experience, coupled with the high-tech equipment used, will most definitely give you the best customer satisfaction. Head over to our website or call us on 0427411789.

9 Questions To Help You Declutter

Contact Us for an effective 'Hoarding Cleanup Service' in Sydney 0412 547 547.  

How to stop hoarding – Simple Tips

Hoarding is dangerous. It has ruined many lives. People who hoard objects are not aware of their condition. They believe every object they collect could be useful to them in the future. Therefore they keep collecting objects and are unable to get rid of them.

If you are a hoarder and wish to stop hoarding here are some tips which will help you.

Start Small – Take out the trash at home, by starting small you can avoid the anxiety of throwing away all unwanted objects at once.  The advantage of taking a starting small is that you will not have any regrets.

Work your way through the kitchen sink – If you have dishes unwashed for a long period of time start by cleaning them. This would help you get rid the harmful bacteria.

Decide, Decide! - Do you really need it?  Make a decision on what to keep. This you help you get organized and reduce the clutter.

Clean you’re the cupboards – Organize the items in your cupboard and remove the unwanted items. Prioritising your items will help you decide want is most needed.

Finish want you started: If you are cleaning one part of your room like your cupboard or drawer finish that completely and only then move to the next. Keep a box ready to move all the unwanted items.

Ask yourself questions – What does this mean to me? Am I holding onto it because someone gave it to me? How long have I had it for? Is this of any use or is it there because I can’t get rid of it? These are questions that will help you decide what exactly needs to be thrown out.

Contact Bio Cleanse Services - Bio-Cleanse offers one-on-one personal assistance to organise and sift through the hoarded matter. If you’re a victim of animal hoarding or hoarding of paperwork we can provide you with assistance to help you live in a clean healthy home.

Call Bio Cleanse Services for hoarding Clean-up estimate at  0412 547 547 and make your home a clean place to live in. 

A to Z about Paper Hoarding

Paper Hoarding is one among many types of hoarding disorders. This kind of hoarding situation involves accumulation of every single paper – be it newspaper, magazine, invoices, bills, letters and much more.

Paper Hoarders generally do not categories the papers they hoard. Most of them find categorizing, a boring activity. They just dump it in a drawer or some box hoping that it would prove helpful in the near future. They feel that if they discard those papers, they will lose out on something really important. 

Hoarding one kind of thing and then another, ultimately leads them to end up piling everything. A situation arises where you cannot move around in the houses due to these hoardings. The piles of newspapers, magazines etc. take up so much place, that movement as well as a room’s usability is affected.

Paper Hoarders have answers to all questions that you shoot at them. For example: 

If suppose the hoarder is hoarding newspapers and you ask the reason behind it, he might say that the newspaper contains a delicious recipe. You might wonder why s/he is keeping the entire newspaper and suggest him to cut it out the required article. S/He will find some other reason to keep the newspaper like there is a funny comic strip or an informative article etc., citing ‘n’ number of reasons to keep the newspaper. S/He will not give up on it easily. It is found that paper hoarders sometimes indulge in thievery. Books borrowed from the libraries or friends, are usually not returned. The only thought in their mind is the doubt whether s/he will be able to borrow it again, sometime in future.

Any house hoarded with paper is an eye sore, giving a shabby look. There is a risk that the hoarder might end up in hurting himself. His place will serve as a home to many rodents and insects. Mould too can also grow up in such places. Fire breakout is also one among the concerns. It’s not just the house, but relationships too suffer.

De-cluttering becomes really difficult for these hoarders. The hoarder will be much attached to the magazines, newspapers, letters, bank statements, gift-wraps etc. Giving up on it may be hard, but worth it.

5 Reasons Why You Should Declutter

To declutter is “the” strategy for overcoming hoarding.

For compulsive hoarders, battling this behaviour is very much a step by step process. Along with the plan of action of physically moving the things and trashing them, a great deal of motivation and correction of thoughts goes into treating a hoarder.

Following are five reasons why you should declutter, in order to overcome hoarding.

1. Some hoarders claim that the clutter gives them “company” and shields them from the outside world. As much as comforting and disorienting this thought might sound, clutter is nothing but an emotional and physical baggage. Clutter clogs our mind with an excess of stimuli: visual, olfactory and tactile. Our senses work beyond normal and hence, it is a mental burden. 
2. Clutter causes embarrassment. Hoarders feel ashamed to show their house around to their friends and acquaintances, simply because the house is a mess. Once you declutter, you tend to ward off social isolation. This will help in building relationships that were lost because of this domestic mess. 
3. Clutter is not hygienic. Inhabiting with junk exposes you to multiple respiratory diseases. If the trash involves dead insects, faecal matter and decaying stuff, then the hoarder is bound to get various infections and diseases, putting personal health in a quandary. 
4. The best part of decluttering is finding things you thought you never had or bought. Hoarding results due to excessive accumulation of stuff that one doesn’t really need. Decluttering will help you unearth extra pair of shoes or unpaid bills and in some cases, money. The recyclable trash and items which you can put on sale (because you don’t need them) can stand the chance to earn you a few bucks. 
5. Decluttering will be the first of many changes. The immediate result is a sanitized personal space and decreased social isolation. Along the way, you will focus your attention on other things rather than accumulating trash, such as practicing yoga or building a new home theatre. 

Contact Bio Cleanse Pty Ltd for Hoarding Management Services.

20 Common Thoughts Inside a Hoarder’s Mind

Hoarding is not a mere accumulation of useless junk. 

It involves many thought processes with the decision to discard. These thought processes impinge on the hoarder’s decision-making process which ultimately results in the item not being discarded. 

Following are some common thoughts what a hoarder is likely to think.

1. “I’ll throw this away later…”
2. “I might need this at a future time…”
3. “I do not know where to store this. It doesn’t belong anywhere.”
4. “I have a feeling that I will clean up soon and that is when I will need some items I have collected.”
5. “This item might be valuable in the future and if I discard it, I will be at a loss.”
6. “I need to prepare myself for the next Great Depression!”
7. “These things offer me a sense of comfort. I am inaccessible to anyone. No one would dare come close to the pile, leave alone me. Hence I am protected.”
8. “These items are actually gifts from someone close. How can I even think of discarding them?”
9. “This reminds me of my lost loved one…it is perhaps the last piece of interaction I have between us two”
10. “My loved one, whom I lost years ago, liked these items. I believe s/he will come someday to collect it.”
11. “I collect these things so that I can possibly gift them to someone later.”
12. “I might be financially deprived to afford these items. Hence, I need to save them, even if they are small things like wrapping paper or ribbons.”
13. “I need to keep this item so that I remember something which I am likely to forget at a future date.”
14. “I feel relieved when I discard my stuff. However, once it’s done, I feel suddenly exposed. They are my safety pile.”
15. “Survival is about being prepared. Hence, I need to collect these items. I need to rely on myself and not on anybody”
16. “People can walk out of your lives. Things don’t.”
17. “Discarding these items makes me feel guilty about discarding it. Like it’s a criminal thing to do.”
18. “Right now, I do not have the time at my disposal to sort through these things. I will keep them here, so I can go through them, another day.”
19. “It gives me an excuse to get out of social obligation. I can always say I can’t go to a party because I have so much cleaning to do.”
20. “I believe in recycle and reuse.”

Contact Bio-Cleanse for Hoarding Cleanup and Management Services. 

Visit www.biocleanse.com.au for more information.

Cleaning up a House in Brisbane

We were called out to this place in Brisbane for a hoarding cleanup. This one was particularly interesting, inside and out. The owner had apparently been living in this filth for years and had collected mounds of bottles, boxes, dishes and the worse is the cats and dogs. The cats were running loose all over the house, no litter boxes anywhere so they urinated and dropped faeces all over the place.

Cat urine has a very strong odour and is very hard to eliminate with routine cleaning. If there is carpet, as was the case here, it has to be pulled up because the urine seeps through to the padding and saturates it. The smell spreads to every room; the cats shed their hair everywhere. It’s just gross and smelly!

The man who lived here had apparently died of a heart attack recently and his kids inherited the property. They must not have been to visit him in a long time or they just had no clue how he was living. I’m amazed he could even breathe in here that’s how bad it was.

We, the professionals at Bio Cleanse Pty. Ltd., use methods that are very strong that won’t just mask the odour, but totally remove it. We threw out all garbage to dumpsters we had kept outside. The dogs and cats have been shifted to some animal care centre. They had dog houses here, so it wasn’t as bad as it should be.

The guy even had a collection of junk in the garage and yard. He had old cars, bicycles, tires, and so on. Who knows, some of it might have some value if you could get past the dirt and the smell.

We get calls like this quite frequently. Hoarders have a different mentality than most people. They find comfort in collecting what other people see as garbage. Some of them seem to be immune to the trash and smell. It’s hard to understand, but it’s more of a problem than most realize.

To know more about our various professional services, and for a free quote visit us at: http://www.bio-cleanse.com.au/

10 Tips for Compulsive Hoarding

Overcoming hoarding disorder can be a real challenge, but it isn’t impossible. Trying to get rid of your old habits can be hard, but everybody has to start somewhere. All it takes is one step at a time. Compulsive hoarding is a result of the following 5 habits:

1. Indecisiveness.
2. Perfectionism. 
3. Procrastination. 
4. Avoidance behaviours. 
5. Difficulty organizing tasks.

         

Here are a few tips to overcome it:

• Don’t buy stuff you don’t need in the near future. 
• More is not necessarily better; limit your usage of products to just one!
• Categorize files or things into categories or departments. 
• Use the OHIO rule, which stands for ‘Only Handle It Once’. Don’t move your things from one file to another, dispose it or keep it in its proper place once for all. 
• Just because you can’t find a reason to dispose, it doesn't mean you have to keep it. 
• Dispose everything you have not used for over a year. 
• Sell, recycle, reuse. 
• Keep a carton for things you don’t need, make a pile and dispose it on a regular basis. 
• Detach yourself from old stuff, even if you have an emotional attachment. 
• Ask for professional help, if you can’t do it on your own. 

Call us on 042 741 1789 or visit us on our website at http://www.bio-cleanse.com.au/services/hoarding-management/ for professional assistance.