The National Association of Social Workers (NASW) has a very great blog post regarding hoarding. I found it so very interesting, as hoarding is a very prevalent issue social workers face with working with the aging population. The NASW posting asked the audience a couple of questions. Is hoarding just a quirk? How have you dealt with it? And of course, the issue I am focusing on is, is hoarding a mental health issue?
Here is the post from a NASW blog – Is Hoarding a Big Deal?
After reading this post, I thought about a client I worked with a couple years ago. This women lived in an independent residential apartment building for seniors 55+. She was one of the first clients I had in my social work career. Here were my thoughts on hoarding.
{I have always been very intrigued by all that affects the older adult population. Hoarding, seems to be yet another ailment that plagues this population’s homes and lives. I agree with many of the other comments classifying hoarding as a mental health issue. I had a client in the past, that I felt, defined herself through her belongings. By losing a belonging it was as though she was losing part of her own self, her own identity. I also felt that she was able to cope through the other losses in her life; death, physical disability, etc. by hoarding more and more items. She was particularly interested in garage sale findings. How I made sense of this particular client, of course, will not fit other older adults. But, I felt this helped me understand what she was experiencing, enabling me to clinically identify the underpinnings of her compulsive hoarding.}
My question is, now what? If it is a mental health issue, how do we handle it differently? This was of categorizing the issue, of course, is apposed to a “quirk” or a style of living. Is there a drug to solve hoarding? Is there a treatment approach, similar to anxiety disorders? Can we use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?
I’ll have to admit that in my own work I enter the homes of hoarding older adults on a monthly to sometimes weekly basis. It is difficult to wrap one’s mind around this very complicated illness, however a recent training I attended by Christiana Bratiotis, Ph.D. candidate at Boston University School of Social Work shed some light on the issue for me. Although I could not possibly sum up her ideas in this note, I can say that her method of using cognitive behavior interventions as a key component made a great deal of sense to me. Furthermore, she pointed out that there are many different factors contibuting to hoarding behaviors, including a growing concensus that there are biological factors involved. Hoarding cannot be treated with short-term interventions, however she gave many examples of how with time, motivation, and an informed clinician interventions can be successful.