Clare, I’m a big fan of English teachers and especially those who use creative ways to get kids excited about descriptive language. So I don’t want to make you feel bad, but…

In using these pictures, I hope that you also treated this situation with some sensitivity. If you had your class write about a situation with an alcoholic, you probably would have kept in mind that some of your students have alcoholic parents. Well, there is a very good chance that a child in your class has a parent who is a hoarder.

No one would ever know - children of hoarders are often very well dressed and high achievers - but they never invite friends over to their house because they are so ashamed. When they saw the photos, they probably laughed and squealed with the other kids - but were dying from shame and embarrassment inside.

My sister and I were honor-roll kids with impressive resumes. Yet we lived without heat or water for months at a time because my mom was too embarrassed by her hoard to call the repairman. We lived with 5-foot high stacks of moldy newspapers. But we were lucky - my mom never got so bad that she hoarded animals, or food waste. When she died, it took us 3 months to clean out the place. We found her missing diamond wedding ring in her old desk, among rotting rubber bands and rusty paper clips.

The person with this apartment is obviously very ill.

Studies have shown that there is no link between hoarding behaviors and how much or how little you grew up with. It is a form of obsessive compulsive disorder, and just like other forms of OCD, it has to do with brain chemistry. Hoarders have brain abnormalities that actually can be seen and measured (see: http://www.sciencedaily.com/re.....070801.htm)

However, the underlying problem can be triggered or made worse by an event. For example, just like a drug addict may be more likely to go on a bender during a stressful time, my mom’s hoarding behavior became more severe after my dad died.

Hoarding is notoriously tough to treat. Hoarders don’t respond to many of the drugs that are usually used to treat OCD. I wish that there WERE a magic pill I could pop to help me with my hoarding tendencies (for example, like a person with ADHD has problems focusing on schoolwork, I have problems categorizing objects and assigning them their actual value. That is why severe hoarders think that food wrappers and cigarette butts are somehow valuable and shouldn’t be thrown out).

Riluzole, which is a medication used to treat Lou Gehrig’s disease, is one of the few medications that may show some promise (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/07/050729224439.htm) I just happened to find out about this because my mom died of Lou Gehrig’s. In the last months of her life while she was taking the Riluzole, she allowed us to throw away ten years of newspaper stacks without a whisper of protest, which stunned us.

There are professional organizers and cleaning companies who are actually trained in dealing with hoarders. More info at: http://www.childrenofhoarders.com/coh49.php

Many landlords have to turn to hazmat crews - the companies that clean up after floods and fires.

I took it to the carwash and told them to throw everything not nailed down away and to steam clean as best they could.