Hoarding isn’t just a matter of having a larger than usual stamp collection or a closet full of beanie babies. It is a serious condition and it affects many people across the country. Hoarding can often increase in severity over time to the point that it becomes extremely disruptive to peoples’ lives or even downright dangerous if left unchecked.

There was a famous case in New York City that involved two brothers who died in 1947 due to hoarding. Apparently their home had so many thousands of unused books, pieces of wood, fruit and vegetable scraps and the like that it had become a serious hazard. Both brothers were found dead in the home, one of them buried under what had been a mountainous stack of old newspapers. There were so many newspapers that the weight of them appeared to have crushed and killed him. The brother who had been killed was the caretaker of the other brother, and medical experts think the second one then died of starvation a few days later.

There are different degrees of hoarding. The beginning symptoms may include getting so behind in basic household chores that the person is embarrassed when they have friends and family over. Things are getting a bit more serious when there is so much junk that it is actually beginning to restrict movement through the home. If this is beginning to sound like you or a friend or family member, it’s time to take action before things get worse.

A trusted adviser who can help the person determine what items are no longer necessary to keep around the house should be brought in to assist with sorting, then a junk removal service should be called in to haul away the items that are no longer necessary. Junk removal services can take almost anything and often times it is not even necessary to set it out for them because they can just come and remove the junk from where it is. The junk removal company can then take items to be donated or disposed of properly, as appropriate.

If hoarding continues unchecked into the more advanced stages, then the piles of junk that were just getting in the way may build up bigger and bigger until they become a falling hazard like it was for the brothers in New York City. Furthermore, as the piles grow, often there will be food items that end up on top of the piles or behind or under them, and things begin rotting. This leads to terribly unhygienic living conditions.

If you or someone you care about might be exhibiting tendencies that could lead to potentially hazardous conditions for you or them, it is important not to let conditions worsen. Sometimes deeper counseling and rehabilitation is necessary. But getting help from a friend or family and a good junk removal service company is a good start.

Recognizing the signs and symptoms of hoarding and keeping all the “stuff” in check is key to preventing a tragedy for hoarders.

If you or someone you know is a hoarder, then that person has a problem. Being a collector of something, anything, books, bicycles, or little ceramic figurines, is not hoarding. Hoarding is a compulsive behavior that makes the individual save things of no intrinsic value for long periods of time. Hoarders save things like old newspapers, bottles, or old, rusty and useless machinery.

The homes and apartments of hoarders are full of useless things. In fact, they’re so full of useless things that whole rooms are full of old clothes, stacks of newspapers and magazines, broken tools, or old dolls and toys. Hanging on to this kind of stuff is not a healthy behavior and one of the best ways to deal with it is to hire a junk removal firm to come in and start hauling away all the useless refuse that is clogging up the hoarder’s life. Of course, simply hauling away the junk is not the sole solution. The individual may require counseling or even years of therapy to overcome this troubling behavior.

However, bringing in a junk removal company is a good start to dealing with a hoarding problem. If you try to help the hoarder yourself by removing things from the home, you could seriously jeopardize your relationship with that person to the point where he or she would refuse to let you help them further. But, when you employ a professional service, you are defusing the situation so you can step back and offer sympathetic help and guidance to the hoarder if he or she starts to stress out about having their “precious” worthless junk removed.

Of course it helps if the people doing the junk removal understand the nature of the situation and behave in a kind and sensitive manner to the hoarder. It may also help if you can distract the hoarder from the whole cleaning process either by keeping them busy with something else or even removing that person from the premises by taking them out to eat or to a movie or doing some other activity that they find pleasurable and relaxing.

An important thing to remember is that taking all the trash from a hoarder’s home isn’t just cleaning it up, you must consider the emotional investment the individual has in the physical possessions being removed. It may seem hard to understand, but you have to be conscious of the fact that hoarders suffer from a mental illness. It can be either a severe mental illness or a relatively mild one, but it’s a condition that requires attention, compassion, and tact from those trying to ameliorate the problem.

Hoarding appears to be an aspect of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and some people suffer from it so severely that only medication and years of therapy can bring them peace. However, if you can get the hoarder to consent to having the junk cleared out of their home and make them see how much easier and nicer life can be without all the clutter, you’re well on the way to helping them to recover. It isn’t always easy however. There have been documented cases of hoarders who met the police or sanitation works with violence, to the point of shooting at them or even killing themselves. That’s why it’s important to handle the problem with sensitivity and patience. Finding the right junk removal company can be a big step in helping the hoarder to let go of all the filth and clutter that are negatively impacting that person’s life.

Once you’ve gotten the hoarder to agree to begin removing the junk, you need to find a trash hauling firm that can handle the job quietly, discretely and with a minimum of stress to the hoarder. One approach might be to begin gradually by cleaning up the exterior of the home, hauling away old useless appliances and other junk, having the lawn mowed, the yard raked, and the bushes pruned. Then, after that phase of the process is completed, bring the hoarder out and show him or her the transformed yard and enjoy how beautiful their home and grounds now look. It may take a lot of patience and coaxing, but with time, the hoarder can have a clean home and begin living a normal life.