A Lawrence man who has attended the hoarding support group at Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center is pictured last month near his garage, where items are piled up along the exterior walls and he has stored decades worth of stuff. The man, who declined to be identified, has sought help for his hoarding compulsions but admits that there are still areas of his home that need work.

It started with a question from a news reporter: “Can I visit your home?”

Jackie, not her real name, panicked. She told the journalist no.

The incident made her realize how embarrassing it would be to have someone see her house, which had become jam-packed with a lifetime worth of items bought at yard sales or found in dumpsters.

That’s when she heard about the hoarding support group at Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center. Started two years ago by therapist Loraine Herndon, the meetings teach people ways to organize and stop accumulating so they can reclaim their living spaces.

There are an estimated 600,000 to 1 million hoarders in the United States. The latest addition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for the first time recognized hoarding as a separate diagnosis; in the past, it had been classified as a symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder or depression. Even so, hoarding is often accompanied by underlying mental-health or substance-abuse issues.

While compulsive hoarders often start accumulating objects in their teens, experts say, they don’t notice it’s a problem until much later, after things have built up for decades. That’s why the best prognosis for changing the lifestyle is 18 months, as Herndon says it takes that long for people to learn to organize, get over their attachment to objects and stop acquiring more.

The disorder has entered mainstream culture in recent years, thanks to the popularity of reality shows as “Hoarders” and “Hoarding: Buried Alive.” But the reality is quite different from what you see on TV, which generally highlights the most extreme cases. Hoarders are often well-educated, successful people who don’t live in squalor. All the same, their hoarding prevents them from having normal lives, and it puts them at risk of injury, eviction or having their children taken away.

Three Lawrence residents who have attended the meetings at Bert Nash agreed to tell their stories to the Journal-World on the condition they be granted anonymity (all three have been given aliases).

Chance encounter inspires change

Jackie, a 58-year-old retired state employee, moved into her first home in the late 1980s. She always liked to accumulate, but relocating from apartment to apartment gave her the opportunity to get rid of stuff every few years. However, the three-bedroom house was so big there didn’t seem to be any limit to what she could acquire.

She collected cookbooks even though she didn’t cook. She took apart electronics for the scrap metal. She brought in stuff from her mother’s home after she downsized.

Jackie was thrifty and didn’t like to see usable objects go to waste, traits shared by many hoarders. She was creative enough to find a new use for almost anything. If she couldn’t repurpose something, she would at least give it to charity. Herndon noted that many hoarders have a much easier time letting go of objects if they’re going to a person or organization that will appreciate them.

Early last year, a local artist did a project inspired by the community that had evolved around the dumpster behind the Social Service League thrift store. The location had turned into a gathering spot for people looking for items to recycle or repurpose. Jackie checked the dumpster there regularly, looking for things of value the store may have overlooked.

She was there one day when a news reporter doing a story on the project asked to visit her home to see all she’d collected from the dumpster. “That was the point I realized I might be like those hoarders on the shows I watch and maybe I should get some help,” Jackie said.

Many compulsive hoarders avoid hosting visitors, sometimes for decades, Herndon said. Instead, they’ll offer to meet people for coffee or make up some excuse for why they can’t have guests over — say, a plumber is fixing a leaky pipe that day. “For most people, there’s an enormous shame connected to it,” Herndon said of hoarding.

Jackie hired an organizer to help her clear out her house but thought the woman was being too pushy. Herndon said that if people force a hoarder to clean up, they risk further alienating the hoarder, and, most of the time, the house will be full again in short order.

About a year after she started attending the group, Jackie says she’s letting go of more things than she’s taking in. Not that it’s been easy.

“It’s like yesterday,” she said in a recent interview. “I had to go to Dillon’s to pick up my refills, my meds. Everything’s ‘manager’s special,’ they’re trying to get rid of it. I spent $30 just walking in the door. I’m getting cheesecake and cut flowers and all kinds of good stuff. I did remember to pick up my prescription refills, thank god.”

An accidental discovery

Herndon got into treating hoarders by accident. After peeling back the layers of what brought a patient into therapy, she would often realize the person was socially isolated because of hoarding.

Such was the case with Rod, a 62-year-old public servant. He started seeing Herndon a few years back to overcome the grief from the death of his wife. The therapist taught him how to dissociate his late spouse from the objects she left behind, which were cluttering his home.

“The reality was, the stuff isn’t the person, and they aren’t the memories,” Rod said. “If you get rid of something of your wife’s after she dies, you’re not getting rid of her. You’re getting rid of an object. Once I hit that, that was the turning point for me. I could then start getting rid of stuff. Because it was stuff.”

Herndon said the goal for Rod and her other patients is to separate their objects into four to six categories (i.e. sell, donate, keep, recycle, throw away.) But she said they usually have trouble getting it down to less than 30 categories; one person she works with has 100.

Even after his realization, Rod says he doesn’t like the word “hoarding.”

“To me a hoarder is a person from World War II who bought way more than they needed so no one else could have it,” he said. “It’s a pejorative term. I prefer ‘management disorder’ or ‘acquiring disorder.'”

Rod adds that he can now spot other hoarders in the community: say, a house where the windows are blacked out, the porch is full of stuff, a car in the driveway is overflowing with objects. “I don’t think modern humans can deal with the kind of abundance we have,” he said.

Fighting the urge to accumulate

Megan, a 53-year-old office worker, has long known she had a lot of stuff — she loved to shop, for one thing — but she didn’t really think it inhibited her life in any way. Then, her apartment complex had to work on some appliances in her unit and couldn’t get to them because of the lack of room.

So she got a storage unit (which Herndon doesn’t recommend) and attended the support group at Bert Nash. Herndon told her to start the process by first cleaning the space she’d most like to use and, after that, clear out one room at a time. “It’s not like one of those reality shows where a team of people come in and over a weekend they magically transform a living space,” Megan said.

She began selling things on eBay and consignment, learning that she often overestimated the value of her items. She gave stuff to charity. She tried to find new hobbies to replace shopping.

“When you declutter, you have to ask yourself some hard questions: ‘How many years has it been since I used this?’ ‘Will I miss this when it leaves?'” she said. “If you’re torn about letting go of something, put it out of sight, have a friend hold onto it or put it in the trunk of your car, and see how it feels to be without it.

Megan also says she no longer buys things just because they seem like a good deal. “I had ads in my car with some very good coupons for Kohl’s and JC Penney, and I am very proud of myself for recycling them with the newspapers,” she said.

In addition, she now actually wants to spend time in her apartment, which she used to avoid doing. “It’s very calming when you see a space that’s decluttered, even if it’s just a small corner,” she said. “You definitely less stressed when you have open space where open space should have been all along.”