Defining Threshholds

"I would never want to be a state that can just sort of put people in institutions. But it's clear to me that anyone who's living this way, who's got tons of paper and junk ... and living outside on their front porch throughout a -20, -30-degree winter...[needs help]."
"I think it's fair to question whether or not that person really does have the ability to take care of themselves."
Josh Matlow, Toronto ward Councillor

"There's only so much that can be done. We all have the right to choose things that are risky for us and clearly that comes with a threshold and that's not easily defined."
Catherine Chater, occupational therapist, specialist on hoarding, VHA Home Healthcare

Who hasn't read about and tch-tched the unfortunate penchant for the elderly, the slightly unhinged, those with compassion for the helpless and the vulnerable slightly beyond reasonability, succumbing to the urge to help and in so doing burdening themselves beyond a point where they are capable of managing, to secure the needs of those to which they have committed themselves, and compromising their own health and well-being, in the process.

These are the sad souls who find themselves overwhelmed when faced with disturbing incidents, coming across abandoned animals, pledging themselves to taking them in, caring for them, until they reach the point of no return, no room, no energy, no funding, no patience, no hope. Often neighbours complain about the stench that seems to emanate from their home next door, or their apartment, and when authorities investigate they find these doddering old dears in a haze of confusion, their home overrun with the presence of cats or dogs whose needs are neglected, sometimes starving, often ill, and needing to be rescued from the rescuer.

And then, of course, there are others in society who submit to a compulsion to collect things around them, seeing items that have been discarded by others which seem to them perfectly useful, in good order, and surely there will come a time when whatever it is that they decide to pick up and take home with them, when the object will be needed? That time may never come, and their home may eventually become cramped with all manner of 'perfectly good' discards waiting to 'be used', with more coming in on a regular basis, until there is scant room left to move.

Or, the individual who discovers a pressing need to hoard newspapers and journals, who stacks them neatly in piles on the floor once shelves have been overwhelmed, and eventually those piles proliferate and reach to the ceiling, and narrow passages between them are all that is left for the home owner to negotiate the way to various rooms of the overcrowded house. These are people for whom life has become overwhelming and unmanageable. They may not recognize that they are in the throes of a pathology that has overtaken their reason, and may not understand that their passion to hoard is unnatural, making their living arrangements quite impossible. They take pride in their compulsion to commit to saving things from being discarded before their time; their thrift and public conscience.

From time to time the presence of these individuals and their inhabitable dwellings come to public light. Authorities step in to clean up the mess. Sometimes the situation is revealed on the death of the hoarder, sometimes when a neighbour makes a complaint. These remain relatively obscure and rare happenings, but they're notable when they come to public light for the psychological disorder from the normalcy of wishing to acquire objects to the urgency of acquiring things simply for the sake of doing it, entirely compromising the quality of the individual's practical life.

Chris So / Toronto Star 

The city boarded up Dennis Cibulka's home 18 months ago after deeming it a fire hazard. Cibulka, 63, has lived in the house for more than 50 years and says he isn’t a hoarder.

In Toronto's Davisville area the environs of the home that Dennis Cibulka lived in reeked of cat urine. The felines had become accustomed to wending their way in the interior through the piles of boxes stacked in the home. The home was packed with overflowing piles of paper, plastics, clothes, boxes. This was a man who collected just about everything from paper to homeless cats. Eventually the city boarded up the house, considering it a fire hazard. There was not even room for the man to live in the house; he took up residence on the porch. And then workers wearing hazmat (hazardous-material-handling outfits) suits came in along with fire officials to clear the home of its baggage.

  Crews in hazmat suits remove debris from a Beech Ave. home on May 12. Toronto Fire used a court order to remove flammable materials from the house that last year had also been overrun with cats. Andrew Francis Wallace / Toronto Star

Neighbours are now concerned once again. They are witness to the fact that the whole scenario is being repeated; Mr. Cibulka is once again filling his home with boxes. His home may have been cleared of the detritus it contained back in November of last year, but his detritus-packed mind had never received any kind of psychological or professional assistance to clear it of the utterly pressing need to recommence hoarding.

And on Beech Avenue another home was cleared out with workers in hazmat suits doing the work of unfilling it, that the home owner had painstakingly caused. At the same time over 50 cats were removed from the house. Along with "excess combustibles". Authorities can take the initiative to clear out a home and bring it into line with the fire code, removing clutter built to impossible proportions, but the individual whose collecting pathology is left with the suddenly-empty home sees an obvious gap and moves to remedy it, the opportunity to begin anew compelling.

Toronto City Council approved SPIDER (The Specialized Program for Interdivisional Enhance Response) in December of last year to enable various municipal departments to co-ordinate their work enabling a situation where hoarding issues are adequately addressed across the city. A City councillor wants it to go further, to review the Mental Health Act so that compulsive hoarding disorder can be medically addressed. Mr. Cibulka rebuffed a city offer of psychological counselling.

Hoarding, only recently labelled as a unique psychological disorder, affects between 2% and 6% of the population.