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Hoarding a health, safety risk for seniors

Dan looks surprisingly relaxed sitting in a wheelchair outside his apartment, waiting for the door to be opened on his life.
FEAX Seniors Hoarding 20100827
Cleaning staff wrap an old couch covered in pigeon droppings

TORONTO — Dan looks surprisingly relaxed sitting in a wheelchair outside his apartment, waiting for the door to be opened on his life.

He only starts to flinch as a team of “extreme cleaners” dons protective suits, arms themselves with garbage bags and braces for the shock waves.

First there is the stench. Then there is the sound. Pigeons have been roosting in Dan’s North York apartment since he was rushed to hospital a month ago with a broken hip, too embarrassed to ask anyone to shut his balcony door.

“I never imagined I could be living like this,” says Dan, 66, as the morning light shines on a crisis of clutter.

Bookshelves crammed with videos are dripping in pigeon droppings. A bird is perched on his toaster.

The only thing that appears untainted amid the mounds of clothes and junk burying the living room floor is Dan’s University of Toronto diploma hanging on the wall.

“My kids won’t come to visit me because they’re ashamed,” says Dan, who asked that his last name not be used. “I’m horrified. I have to face up to reality.

“Who else lives like this?”

A shocking number of seniors, it turns out.

Many of them have lived through the Depression and place a high value on stuff, even after they’ve accumulated so much it has become a health and fire hazard.

They are often too ashamed or terrified to ask for help, fearing that their living conditions will land them in long-term care facilities and destroy what little independence they have left.

Some are full-blown hoarders, suffering from mental illnesses that make them cling to the detritus of their long lives, even if it puts them at risk of deadly falls or other health problems.

Many are just overwhelmed by life, depressed at growing frail and fiercely clinging to reminders of friends and family who have died before them — like the 91-year-old North York woman who outlived her four children and couldn’t part with their possessions, including dozens of inflatable toys which she crammed into her one-bedroom apartment.

“There are so many out there that we don’t even know about. It’s a crisis,” says Lenore Cabral of VHA Home HealthCare, which operates a 16-person “extreme cleaning” team and tackles about 250 homes a year in Toronto and North York.

“They’re so isolated. No one is checking up on them. You think in an apartment building that people have friends, they make connections. But that’s often not the case. As soon as they close their door, that’s it.”

Many of these seniors live secret lives — they venture out but allow no one in their homes. It’s generally a crisis that leads to a cleanup — mice or bed bug infestations, slips or falls that land them in hospital.

Quite often neighbours sound the alarm, as happened during a recent heat wave when the smell wafting from a North York bungalow was so horrid that a woman walking her dog feared the 86-year-old homeowner had died.

Emergency service workers arrived to find the woman was fine, but the house so crammed they could barely push open the door. It took a nine-member cleaning team four days to make the house habitable.

When the woman’s daughter was alerted, she broke down in tears: Her mother had so carefully guarded her secret, it had been 11 years since the daughter had been inside in the house. Her mother always insisted they meet elsewhere, or was waiting outside.

Clutter, and its more extreme form, hoarding, are seen as such a major issue in Toronto that three years ago the Toronto Hoarding Coalition was formed. Every two months some 30 to 40 representatives of public health, social housing, community services and mental health groups meet to share stories and co-ordinate strategies for tackling a public health problem many of them see all too regularly.

It’s been estimated that one to 2.5 per cent of the population are hoarders, but Ottawa-based hoarding intervention specialist Elaine Birchall believes that’s a very conservative estimate.