SINGAPORE: Say “hoarder” and images of stacked newspapers and boxes, little space to move, and in some cases, scurrying cockroaches come to mind.

These are the kinds of homes that Habitat for Humanity Singapore has entered and tried to turn around. Decluttering them, however, does not mean entirely ridding them of unwanted items.

“When you use the word declutter, we are always assuming that we are able to get the hoarder to fully declutter but in our experience, we have not seen too many cases of that happening for those who severely hoard things,” said Mr Yong Teck Meng, the housing charity’s national director.

It is a “huge challenge”, he told CNA938.

“Every item you want to discard, you need to get the permission of the hoarder. Maybe about one hour, two hours down into the activity of decluttering, the hoarder will tell you that he or she is not able to go on because it's very traumatic to him, so then you have to stop,” he said.

What is more common is reducing the severity of hoarding to some extent, said Mr Yong.

Among the homes his organisation has tried to improve is one in Jurong that was so blocked that its occupier had to climb over a small mountain of items just to get inside. At another home, 33 visits over one-and-a-half years led to the clearing of just one-third of its contents.

WHY DO PEOPLE HOARD?
The root cause of hoarding behaviour is complex, Senior Minister of State for National Development Sim Ann said in Parliament on Monday (Sep 12). She was responding to several questions from Members of Parliament on the issue which came to the fore after a fire in a cluttered home left one man dead.

The Singapore Civil Defence Force said at the time that the firefighting and damping down operation for the incident was very challenging as the entire unit contained "a large volume of debris that was closely packed together from wall to wall".

Hoarding could be a symptom of underlying mental health conditions like obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) or developed after trauma or deep grief, she said.
Source: CNA