Terry Prone: Hoarding’s hidden issues begin to emerge from the background

Their father was a gynaecologist, their mother an opera singer, the family making claims to have arrived in America as far back as 1621. 

They lived in Manhattan and seem to have been bright lads — the elder, Homer, getting his first degree at exactly 20 years of age, having entered university at just 14. The younger brother, Langley, in addition to sterling academic work, was a concert pianist who played Carnegie Hall, although he gave up professional playing in the 1930s.

“Paderewski followed me,” Langley told a reporter. “He got better notices than I. What was the use of going on?”

Although he stopped playing publicly, he continued his connection with musical instruments, making a living as a piano dealer, while his brother practised law. 

After the deaths of their parents, the two, sharing the family’s Manhattan brownstone, tipped their hats to neighbours and lived respectable, quiet, but nonetheless social lives. In 1933, the lawyer was stricken with an eye problem which left him functionally blind and unable to work. His brother gave up his job to care for him. They had inherited enough money not to have to worry about finances, and they resided in a house with bookshelves stuffed to the rafters with volumes read and unread. 

Their neighbourhood, meanwhile, went downhill, with homes losing value and stories of break-ins and burglaries, which seem to have encouraged the brothers to live rather more reclusive lives.

Inside the house they had inherited, they set out to protect themselves from potential burglars by stacking newspapers and other detritus in ways that created elaborate corridors and tunnels while also facilitating booby traps to ensnare any home invaders. The tunnels and piles of rubbish became more intricate as Langley — the brother who could see — never threw anything out. 

The word spread within the area that these two men were eccentric, which inevitably caused people to gawk, and worse — teenagers broke the windows with thrown stones. The Collyer brothers reacted by boarding up the windows, compounding the internal darkness created by the towers of garbage within. 

The 15,000 medical books inherited from their father could not now be read, because the brothers had stopped paying utility bills, and the electricity had been cut off. Perhaps due to the use of candles, a fire broke out in the house at one point, and was bad enough to require the attention of the fire brigade. 

Langley refused to let the firefighters talk to his brother. The lads in the fire engine shrugged and left the two of them at it.

In March 1947, a caller phoned the local cop shop to report a smell so peculiarly bad, the informant suggested it could be generated only by a dead body. Seven officers visited the house, although “visited” might be something of an understatement, because when they couldn’t get a response from either brother, they broke in, only to find themselves facing walls of tightly-packed and fairly random rubbish they could neither get through or around. 

The boys in blue made the sensible decision to toss as they went, opened the front door, and starting to hurl litter into the street. Hour after hour they worked, eventually finding — in a tiny alcove amid corridors of piled debris — the crouched corpse of the blind brother who, it was determined, had starved to death. 

The searchers kept working, although as the days and eventually weeks progressed, rumours grew that Langley had abandoned his brother and fled the house. But the smell persisted, and almost a month after Homer was found, so was Langley — asphyxiated by hoarded materials that had collapsed on him when he accidentally triggered one of his own defensive booby traps.

New focus on hoarding

The Collyer brothers, for many decades, were seen as unique in their hoarding. 

In 2009, however, a reality TV series entitled Hoarders invited viewers to visit the homes of people suffering from what by then was acknowledged to be a psychiatric disorder and follow them as they underwent treatment.

The series was sponsored by a company specialising in the clearing out of hoarders’ homes and could be seen as the modern equivalent of the permission granted in the 19th century for visitors to London’s Bethlem mental hospital to visit and gawk at the patient’s behaviours.

Now however, hoarding in the US is being taken much more seriously, with the publication earlier this year of a report by the senate special committee on aging — which cast the disorder as an emerging and age-related crisis. What caused the new concern was research showing that while hoarding affects 2% of Americans, it disproportionately and more severely afflicts up to 6% of people older than 70. America is looking at having a quarter of its population in that age group by 2060. 

That’s a lot of modern Collyer brothers.

Threat to public health

When the committee was trying to figure out how much of a threat to public health is presented by the inability to discard possessions, regardless of their monetary or practical value, they found themselves receiving worried reports — not just from social workers, but from firefighters and first responders, the people who see at first hand the havoc wreaked by what used to be seen as an intriguing eccentricity worth a voyeuristic glance. The report said: 

Data from the national fire incident reporting system show the number of hoarding-related residential structural fires increased 26% between 2014 and 2022.

“Some 5,242 residential fires connected to cluttered environments during that time resulted in 1,367 fire service injuries, 1,119 civilian injuries, and over $396m in damages. For older adults, those consequences include health and safety risks, social isolation, eviction, and homelessness. For communities, those consequences include public health concerns, increased risk of fire, and dangers to emergency responders.”

The problems to be addressed are two-fold. The first is that it’s difficult to diagnose sufferers, because the evidence for them having the disorder is concealed within their own homes and may be coincident — particularly in the aged — with a gradual withdrawal from wider human contact.

The second problem is the cure issue. Even back in the reality TV days, it was clear that, while satisfying programmes could be made of houses being decluttered and cleaned, and while the hoarding sufferer involved might engage in counselling and subjectively report improvement in their condition, an actual cure was not readily available. No FDA-authorised treatment has emerged since, although some evidence suggests antidepressants may help a bit.

Just how much of a problem hoarding is in Ireland’s growing older population is unclear. But the likelihood is that it precisely parallels the American experience.

Meaning that we have a hidden problem of substantial proportions.