5 Tips for Dementia Caregivers About Hoarding Behaviors
Are You Noticing Clutter in Your Loved One’s Home?
As caregivers, we often wonder if the changes we see in our loved ones’ homes are just signs of aging or something more. Have you noticed clutter piling up in unusual places?
This could be an early sign of dementia.
Clutter vs. Hoarding: What’s the Difference?
In the world of dementia care, there’s a big difference between clutter and hoarding. Clutter happens when items accumulate and create a disorganized environment. It’s common to see piles of laundry or scattered bills. While it can make life difficult, clutter doesn’t usually pose serious health risks.
Hoarding, on the other hand, is a more severe behavior. It involves collecting items and refusing to part with them. This can lead to unsafe living conditions, such as narrow hallways filled with newspapers or spoiled food hidden in corners.
Hoarding often stems from deeper psychological issues, but in dementia, it might not be true hoarding. It could be a result of cognitive decline affecting the ability to organize and plan.
Why Does This Happen?
When it comes to dementia, the accumulation of items is often not intentional. Changes in the brain make it difficult for your loved one to organize their belongings. They might leave things out because seeing them helps them remember what they need to do.
For example, multiple toothbrushes scattered around the house may be their way of ensuring they remember to brush their teeth.
Safety First
As a caregiver, your top priority is safety. If clutter or hoarding behavior is making the home unsafe, it’s important to take action. Clear pathways, remove fire hazards, and ensure food is not being hoarded in unsafe conditions.
Sometimes, your loved one may need to be involved in this process to reduce anxiety and give them a sense of control.
Understanding the Cause
Not all hoarding is the same. For some, it might be tied to past experiences, like food insecurity from earlier life trauma. Understanding the root cause of their behavior is key to providing the right support.
Creating Clear Storage
To help manage clutter, consider using clear storage containers. These allow your loved one to see what’s inside, making it easier for them to find what they need without creating more mess.
Never Judge
Finally, remember that these behaviors are not a reflection of who your loved one was. The changes you see are due to the progression of dementia. Approach each situation with patience and compassion.
By understanding the difference between clutter and hoarding, and knowing how to address it, you can help maintain a safe and supportive environment for your loved one. Keep these tips in mind as you continue your caregiving journey.
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[0:00] Well, welcome back, Christian caregiver, to Christian Dementia Caregiving, the podcast where I teach Bible-believing Christians techniques and strategies to make your caregiving journey easier because I want you to still have hope as well as find practical help for your dementia caregiving journey. So welcome to today’s five quick tips episode for dementia caregivers, and we’re going to to tackle another different type of dementia behavior that we do not often hear about or see, and that is called hoarding or quote-unquote hoarding. So let us talk a little bit about hoarding. What is hoarding and specifically what is meant by hoarding related to dementia? And I find this topic very interesting because I have a different view of hoarding than a lot of people in the dementia care economy because there’s a significant difference between clutter and hoarding. So let’s start with that. What is clutter? Clutter is when we have stuff put down all over the place. It is distinct between hoarding and clutter because they are similar, but they’re not necessarily related.
[1:27] Clutter is disorganized piles of things that accumulate over time all over the the place. Tables, hallways, common items put in multiple different places of the house and the house looks disorganized and unkept. Piles of bills, piles of laundry, things all over the house and it doesn’t necessarily
Understanding Clutter vs. Hoarding
[1:52] impact health or pose a serious health risk. It makes life difficult because.
[1:59] It’s disorganized. Now the definition of hoarding is different. So clutter is one thing. Hoarding is something different. Hoarding is characterized by accumulating objects and not wanting to throw them away. It can be very severe. It can be very persistent. It can result in houses that have narrow hallways because it’s all items of the same thing, like boxes of newspapers making the hallways, narrow and small, people not wanting to throw anything away.
[2:34] Empty boxes all over the place, and very, very much so can pose a lot more serious health and safety risks. It can increase your risk of falling, of fire hazards, of isolation.
[2:49] And is often attached to other health conditions like obsessive-compulsive disorders or other types of those things happening in a person’s brain. Now, having said that, I’m not always sure that what we call, quote-unquote, hoarding in dementia is necessarily hoarding, because I believe hoarding to be something that a person, even though they are doing it habitually, they’re able to think through what they are doing. And hoarding is oftentimes very systematized. In my experience for people living with dementia, I often more see clutter, not true hoarding. I’m not saying some people with dementia don’t hoard, but what I’m saying is what I have noticed over time in working with people with dementia who one would call a hoarder is it’s really as a result of the fact that their Their brain has started to change and they’re not able to organize, which is one of those executive functions that we were talking about last week. They’re not able to organize and plan things the way they always did. And when I see something, I use it. So therefore, I don’t put anything away.
[4:06] I’ll never forget, I walked into a woman’s house once, a beautiful home. Obviously, when she didn’t have any trouble, the house didn’t look like this, but the house was cluttered. In her bedroom, she had piles of clothes that had been put out, never put away.
[4:22] But I don’t think she was putting them away because if she could see them, she knew that she could wear them. And so there was piles of clothes. The dresser had piles of things. But what I found fascinating is what were on the piles. Every section, every area of the house had a toothbrush and a toothpaste together. It was like she had multiple toothbrushes and toothpaste clutter all over the house because when she saw it, that was what cued her to actually go brush her teeth. And so clutter, to me, is what we typically see more related to dementia behavior. And clutter can be an early sign or an early indication that something is going on specifically if the person and their environment never used to look that way. Are you a Christian dementia caregiver struggling to cope? Does dementia caregiving really need to be this hard? I invite you to join our free monthly Ask the Dementia Coach meetup.
[5:28] Get personalized guidance and support from me, a pastor’s wife, occupational therapist, and Christian dementia coach. By blending evidence-based strategies with Christian principles, you can radically improve your caregiving experience. Register now for our next session of Ask the Dementia Coach. We limit registrations, so don’t miss out. Sign up today.
Quick Tips for Caregivers
[5:53] So now for some five quick tips. Let’s talk about quick tips related to hoarding and clutter behavior.
[6:00] Number one is we do need to understand the cause. Now, many, many times, like I said, it is because of the actual changes in the person’s brain that they are either not able to plan, they’re not able to organize anymore, and so therefore they may have clutter. Now, on the flip side, if the person has a lot of anxiety, then they may actually be hoarding and you have to understand the cause. So here’s a good example of somebody who was hoarding in a nursing home and what they were hoarding was food. And so what was very interesting in this particular person’s situation is at the end of a meal, if there was any food left over, that person wanted to keep the food and take it to their room with them. And the reason that this person wanted to do that was, and this is where the understand the reason, understand the cause, was because she had actually been a concentration camp survivor and she never knew when her next meal would come. So the strategy that we have to employ with somebody who has that type of a history is different than somebody who is hoarding for a different reason. So first quick tip is understand the cause, which goes back into the framework that I have, which is called the peace framework, the person, the environment, the activity, participation, the caregiver contribution.
Safety Considerations in Caregiving
[7:29] And then looking at evaluating and changing things as we need to. So understanding the cause, that’s quick tip number one. Quick tip number two is we do need to consider safety. We have to consider that if the behavior has changed the house to the point that it is not safe, we want to remove the risks and the hazards. We want to clear clutter from the walkways. We want to, if it’s a person hoarding food, we want to clean out the fridge and make sure the food is not spoiled, but really focus on fire safety and safety.
[8:09] Spoiled food related to this particular challenging behavior or behavior in a person living with dementia. Now, this next strategy may be a little bit difficult for some people, but the thing I want you to consider is whether or not to involve the person or not involve the person. Sometimes it is vitally important to involve the person living with dementia because they experience anxiety. And that’s part of the reason that they’re holding onto stuff is it gives them comfort. It gives them a sense of control. So if that is what is precipitating this particular behavior, then we do not want to throw things out without helping them with that process. However, if the person is just collecting things and there’s no emotional attachment to the clutter, involving them in the decluttering process may actually be more difficult because you’re going to be needing to rationalize and make decisions about what to throw out, and you might not want to do that. So you truly need to know and understand the person that you’re helping before you make this particular decision of whether or not to involve the person living with dementia.
[9:25] Tip strategy is, you know, paying attention to the why behind the what. So why are we hoarding? Are we needing control? Are we needing safety? Are we just forgetting that we have this item?
Involving the Person in Decluttering
[9:39] The why behind the what. I want you to really think about the why behind the what. And then helping, last quick tip for today, is helping the person with designated storage. And you want to make sure that if you’re using storage, that it’s clear so that the person can see what is inside the container because out of sight, out of mind for the person living with dementia. So, you know, there’s a lot of different factors that come into these types of behaviors that people have. But like I said at the beginning of this episode, really there is a difference between clutter and hoarding. And it’s a mild distinction. And maybe I’m one of the few peoples who think that there’s a big distinction between clutter and hoarding. But hoarding to me is vastly, vastly different
Distinguishing Clutter from True Hoarding
[10:27] than what I frequently see in people living with dementia. But I hope these quick tips have been helpful to you today. I do want you to understand the biggest thing is never, ever, ever judge. Never, ever judge this person for what these funny things that they may be doing now that are things that they never would have done in their life before.
[10:47] Don’t judge them for that. They are losing their ability to plan and to process and to organize. And those are the higher level executive functions that we have been talking about. So an early sign of dementia can be a person who is all of a sudden now starting to have more clutter. A later sign of dementia can be really true signs of hoarding, like, true, true hoarding, which is repetitively keeping back the same types of things. Really, really a person whose house is a hoarder’s house does actually have some order to it. It’s been fascinating when I’ve been in people who are hoarder’s houses.
[11:27] There is method to the madness in the sense of what they are keeping and how they are actually storing it. So somebody living living with dementia, typically in my experience,
Early Warning Signs for Caregivers
[11:38] it is clutter that has gotten overboard. And I hope that this episode has been valuable to you today. If you are a family caregiver of somebody who is starting to exhibit clutter, that is an early warning sign for you related to other types of things like medication management, paying their bills, driving, all of those types of things. So into this conversation that if you are starting to see clutter, it should be like an alarm bell going off in your head related to other stuff, related to this person being able to manage by themselves anymore. So I know that this episode was a short episode. I trust that it was valuable to you today. I invite you again this week. We are doing our monthly meetup, Ask the Dementia Coach monthly meetup. It’s not too late to sign up for those. You can sign up for it by messaging me the word ask or messaging me on Instagram the word ask, just the word ask. It’ll start an automation that sends you a link to register for this. You can be anonymous. You do not need to use your personal name in the Zoom room.
Join the Ask the Dementia Coach Meetup
[12:52] It is co-creation, it is you coming onto this podcast and me helping you in real time with the real problem and giving you a real solution for you to implement and make your caregiving journey easier. So I invite you, if you haven’t taken me up on one of these, the next one is tomorrow, August the 22nd at 6 p.m. Eastern time. It’s about an hour of your time and you help me tremendously by giving people exactly the questions that other people are asking related to dementia and dementia caregiving. So this is your opportunity to serve other people in our community as well. So come visit, talk to me. I love getting to know you and your own particular circumstances. So join me for the next Ask the Dementia Coach episode, which we are going to be recording tomorrow, August the 22nd at 6 p.m. If you haven’t yet signed up, go ahead and sign up. If you haven’t yet left me a review on Apple Podcasts, do that too. I actually read them. They encourage me. I am doing this podcast as a service to you, and I want it to be what you need. So please let me know what it is that you need. And as I end all of these, may the Lord bless you and keep you, and I will see you in the next episode.
