Teresa Nielson Hayden goes in search of the truth about animal hoarding and writes a post several people have pointed me to. Lay readers will find the phenomenon disturbing and fascinating. As a psychiatrist I see more than my share of these folks coming to the attention of the mental health authorities and hospitalized on my service for being unable to care for themselves. While TNH, too simply, notes that “hoarding used to be thought of as an eccentricity, but more and more it’s being recognized as a social problem–and, more to the point, a form of mental illness”, there are delicate decisions and a complicated evaluative process to be faced in each given case to decide if it is evidence of psychiatric disturbance or merely an eccentricity of which an (often socially isolated) person should not be deprived and for which they should not be penalized with the loss of their autonomy. It may be both; the tolerable quirkiness of the longterm ‘cat lady’ may turn eventually — only in the end — to tragedy for both the animals and their benefactor when she (almost invariably a woman, almost invariably elderly) is disabled by physical or mental illness or inanition and no longer able to care for them. It is psychiatrically trendy to recognize hoarding as a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder (don’t forget, OCD is treated by the best-selling serotonin reuptake inhibitor class of antidepressants — Prozac and its cousins — and, if your favorite tool is a hammer, it pays to see everything as if it were a nail) and to lump animal hoarding in with other bizarre and out-of-control collecting pnehomena. This is too simple, however; in cases where animal hoarding is due to an illness, the definitive stroke in the person’s inability to care for herself and her animals is often a dementing process such as Alzheimer’s Disease or a late-life psychotic disorder instead.
One point that has struck me over and over again is how serendipitous it usually is that the squalor and misery in which such a person is living comes to anyone’s attention and provokes an intervention. TNH cites statistics about the estimated prevalence of the problem, but my strong instinct is that the recognized cases represent the tip of the iceberg. As such, they dramatize the epidemic of social neglect of the elderly in our society. I would love to see statistics of the prevalence of animal hoarding in other societies correlated with their community and social welfare infrastructure.
As she concludes her post, which does an impressive job of collecting and presenting what she has gleaned from intelligent googling on the topic, TNH starts to slide down the slippery slope of villifying — or citing sources which villify — the ‘cat ladies’ for their denial and their control motivations. Again, I would emphasize that this is tarring with a broad brush, and it is largely the brush of the animal welfare advocates who share the social prejudices about the odd, the different, the deviant, the offensive. Every case is different; some are harmless eccentrics; most are mentally ill and not in control, and needing help rather than prosecution (although I fully support the interventions of the animal welfare agencies and the health departments which often have to condemn the dwellings in which these unfortunate scenes have played themselves out). Very few are malevolent in their conscious intent.
