We got to the point, about a week ago, where basically his condo was 90% cleared out. I mean specifically that in both his living room and spare bedroom, almost everything, that has been so packed in and piled up and covered with years, no decades worth of dust is gone. Most of it packed in boxes and stuffed carefully into his garage. Some of it, maybe 30%, stuffed into garbage bags or cardboard boxes and actually thrown away!
I told him largely that I am out now. I have other things to do, and I want to help him with fixing up his place now that you can see his floors - his place needs the old carpet ripped out, linoleum in his kitchen ripped out, and then a paint job, new floors, wall to wall shelves wherever possible to hold his ginormous CDs and books collections... Happy to help him select these things and find guys to do the work, but I am not going to go box by box with the shit remaining and help him sort what he wants to keep (also mostly junk to toss) or throw out.
He is painfully slow to make decisions about what to throw away, even though he recognizes that the way and amount of stuff he's kept is a sickness.
The easiest example to point out re. the sickness is his guide book collection. He had HUNDREDS of travel guidebooks dating back 20 years. Many places he's been to (he's extremely well traveled) and many more he hasn't, but imagined going to. The sickness is that he has MANY duplicates or even triplicates of THE EXACT SAME BOOKS.
While creating a huge mess in his condo, he "buried" books in boxes or drawers or even simply still in the original plastic shopping bags he bought them in, with receipts and all still in the bags. And after burying them, he went out and bought the exact same books again, and again.
The same scenario of multiple copies of things exist across other possessions of his like CDs, cassettes, Walkman type portable CD or cassette players, headphones for said items.
I think my comments to him resonated - that BY HAVING TOO MANY THINGS AND MAKING A HUGE MESS, HE HAD NOTHING because he couldn't find his possessions among the huge mess.
So here we are now. He has asked me multiple times "what do I do now?" when the answer is simply "grab the next box of books and pamphlets, place it on the table, get two empty boxes and place them beside you, and sort the box you are working on into 'keep' or 'toss' boxes."
I have to get him into weekly therapy to talk this out with a professional psychologist. He is extremely lugubrious, and requires 10 kicks in the ass to start doing anything.
Experts say helping can actually be damaging.
Good luck!
and thanks, i learned a new word
+1
I doubt he has any steak of autism, though I'm not particularly knowledgeable about that so of course it's possible. Paranoid schizophrenia seems what my dad and younger brother were both diagnosed with at one point or another.
OCD for sure at some level, as am I in certain situations or pretty much all the time when work is involved, which in my fields isn't such a bad thing. It's not to the extent that it stops me or even slows me down from making decisions, usually, but I tend to make accurate ones that are well thought through.
It's bizarre to me that he's clean on personal levels of hygiene, yet could allow his living space to become so cluttered and literally filthy.
We repaired his vacuum this past week, and today finally I thoroughly vacuumed his living room, spare bedroom, and in most places vacuumed walls, corners, baseboards, windowsills, and a air duct intake grate that is gonna be some fun to unscrew and see the condition of the fiberglass (I presume fiberglass) filter that's behind that hvac air intake grate. In my experience they should be washed every 6 months or more often, and I can only imagine what his looks like that hasn't been cleaned or changed in 20 years. I told him once I open and remove it, I almost certainly won't wash it but rather throw it out. We can go straight to a home Depot or local hardware store and buy a new replacement filter (usually these are a pre-filter type screen) and at the same time and trip look at his HVAC unit itself and the finer paper or cellulosic filter likely to be on that, and replace it too. And my brother has dealt with respiratory problems for years, and never bothered to take care of his HVAC filters. Sheesh.
Yada yada I am rambling. Thoughts and shared support for those of you in similar situations with family members. Yeah we have some screaming sessions at times, and he gets hysterical over my pushing him far more often than is comfortable for either of us. I don't think I am hurting him though, and he seems and flat out tells me he's appreciative of what I've done and what we've accomplished to this point.
At the same time we enjoy each other's company mostly over food whether going out for dinner (pretty darn often) or when I cook for him. Smshmth knows how we enjoy eating well and drinking good wine...
One side "benefit" of the hoarding is his wine collection. We drank a 20 year old dry Portuguese Douro red at Drew's Bayshore Bistro in Keyport with a delicious Cajun meal... (as our 2nd bottle) and it was fantastic. LOL on me, I was figuring it's a darn good bottle, maybe a $200 one to purchase in a restaurant if it was a current vintage and not a BYOB.
LOL when I looked it up, it's actually a very rare and prestigious bottle and the most recent, currently available vintages cost about $280 new in wine shops! So a 20 year old bottle in great shape? Drew my friend that was something like a $1500 - $2000 bottle we opened there! And we have another one, single vineyard wine from the same producer, perhaps even more valuable!
Well at least I recognized it in the category my Aussie pals call "fucking good juice."
It's interesting because my father saved a lot of things (they were divorced) but his saving was more from a depression mentality that he grew up with (reusing wrapping paper, etc.) but he wasn't a hoarder per se. Both of them had so much crap in their homes when they died it took what felt like eons to clean out.
I admire your perseverance to help your brother. Good luck!