You have this tenant. A retired person, keeps to their self, never bothers anybody. You sense a few peculiarities about this person. They always keep the curtains over their apartment windows closed, you never see them open. If you knock on their door to speak to them about something, they never open it, so you talk through the door. They act like they have something to hide. Then one day the neighbor in the apartment below this tenant informs you that there is water leaking from the apartment above. So, you give a 24-hour notice to enter for repairs, and when you and the repairman go into the apartment, you are knocked over with dismay.

There is no discernable arrangement of what could be called a living area. Within every square foot of the apartment are tightly stacked boxes amidst an array of plastic bags of every stripe containing the most disconnected assortment of "stuff" from floor to ceiling. You suppress your astonishment as you notice that the only means for navigating from one room to the other are through cleverly crafted paths, just barely wide enough for one person. Whether you know it or not, you've just entered the domain of a hoarder.

The reason I can describe this scene so vividly is because of the mental pictures I have from actually visiting this apartment. What I forgot to mention was the fact that, in order for my fire prevention partner and I to move throughout the apartment, we had to proceed one step at a time… move a bag… step… move another bag… step again. Seems that, where paths once existed, the avalanche of plastic bags had now cascaded into their wake.

Hoarders, clutterers and pack rats. We don't use the term "pack rats" anymore, too degrading. But hoarders and clutterers are people who are stuck in a morass of psychological dysfunction. They collect stuff. And every bit of the stuff they collect has a particular value known only to themselves. It could be a collection of magazines with articles that they enjoyed reading, so they keep them, for whatever reason, in hopes of some day organizing them so they can refer to them or cite them later on. Or, it could be used facial tissue, the kind you blow your nose with. If you only use half of it, why not save it? Soon they save bags of it, never throwing them away.

Sound like madness? It is. The annals of psychological discourse and study reveal that hoarders suffer from a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It never really occurs to hoarders that they have a problem until, one day, a pile of their stuff falls on them. Their fear of what to do paralyses them into inaction while, at the same time, they cannot resist the urge to continue collecting more stuff. The problem goes well beyond merely coming up with a way to neatly organize all their worldly possessions. They genuinely have no idea where to begin separating what to keep from what to get rid of. And, once a fire inspector is brought in to address the issue, the stress level of a hoarder can escalate.

Next month I'll talk about the process of educating both the hoarder and the landlord, and about how we attempt to work together to resolve the problem.

Stay safe and we'll see you next month.