Look inside hoarder's house to reveal loss, despair

WICHITA FALLS, Texas — In north Texas, a home was so unsanitary that it required a professional to wade through the clutter.

Inside the home in Wichita Falls, Texas, John Wall, the operator of a local branch of Steri-Clean, take a deep breath before he opens the front door.

Steri-Clean is a franchise provider of hoarding cleanup services.

Inside the house, the air is thick with the smell of cat urine and trash is everywhere.

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"If you look down here, rotten food," said Wall as he walked us through the kitchen. "You can see all the flies."

From there, the rooms only get worse as the stacks of stuff grows. Weeks ago, this family's adult son called Wall asking whether his Steri-Clean service could help dig his family out.

"This is about three days worth of work, de-cluttering it and cleaning it," Wall said.

But how did this happen? The homeowner agreed to speak as long as he wasn't fully identified. He'll be referred to as Stan.

"We didn't really have a problem until we saw the bugs," said Stan.

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He said the clutter started eight weeks ago when he discovered bedbugs. He and his wife have medical issues and can't lift much, making cleaning tough. They have stayed at a hotel for the last few weeks.

"Oh God, I hadn't even looked in here," he said as he looked inside his son's bedroom. For a split second, Stan seemed to be seeing his home through new eyes.

Did Stan consider himself a hoarder?

"Uh, it depends on who you ask," he said.

Angela Thomas, a registered nurse in her sixth year chairing the Hoarding Task Force of Greater Dallas, thinks Stan falls into that category.

"Yes," she said. "He looks like a hoarder."

She said loss is the root of why someone hoards. In Stan's case, losing his health may have triggered a depression that contributed to the mess.

"It is really not a cleanliness problem," Thomas said. "It's an emotional issue."

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Doctors estimate up to 5% of the population hoards. In north Texas, that's roughly 350,000 people who are hoarders.

Of those, people who are anxious about throwing anything out could be diagnosed by a doctor with hoarding disorder. But many more people are considered general hoarders, who can't or don't clean their home, but are open to throwing things out.

"We're not hoarders," Stan said. He couldn't associate his home with that kind of problem.

It's clear a tidy house doesn't create a tidy mind, so Steri-Clean finishes jobs by pairing clients with a mental health professional in their town.

"We work basically one on one with them to try to get them to understand, 'This is your mindset then and this is your mindset now,' " Wall said.

The goal is that with emotional support, hoarders have the best chance at a consistently cleaner life — one where they're no longer living in a dirty secret.

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