The link between messiness and mental health is real. These low-lift tips for keeping a clean-enough home will help.
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I think this article contains helpful tips and strategies for approaching the issue of clearing up excess clutter. OTOH, I found this framing of the issue unsatisfactory:
The clutter that can accumulate when people are experiencing a mental health crisis is neither a form of hoarding, nor the result of laziness. The culprit is extreme fatigue, said N. Brad Schmidt, a distinguished research professor of psychology at Florida State University.
This is written in a way that suggests that hoarding is not something that occurs due to a mental health crisis. It sounds like Schmidt is lumping together hoarding with laziness and distinguishing them somehow from other forms of clutter. “Extreme fatigue” comes off sounding like a more sympathetic explanation that hoarding/laziness. But I was certainly under the impression that hoarding is driven by mental health issues, whether it’s anxiety, OCD or depression or other mental health issues.
I liked the description of “decision fatigue.” My younger kid (now a senior in college) has always lived in piles and piles of clutter. I can see elements of anxiety and ADHD type decision fatigue behind his behavior. But those are more in the nature of chronic conditions that need to be managed versus a mental health “crisis.” Using the word “crisis” implies something more acute.
But again, I agree that the article contained helpful suggestions.
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I agree that the article has many helpful suggestions and situations.
I didn’t take it the way you did re: not addressing hoarding/mental health issues. I read is as ANOTHER culprit could be extreme fatigue - so sometimes it could be a hoarding/mental health situation, other times it could be extreme fatigue messiness.
That was just my perception.
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When my daughter was in elementary school, our apartment was a big mess. Most weekends we visited our aunt and uncle in another state and I remember how much calmer I felt walking into their house. It took several years of really good psychotherapy before I could (literally and figuratively) clean up my act. It feels so much better to live (and work most days!) in an environment that is not cluttered. Not perfect to be sure but much better than before!
And now as a psychotherapist myself, I frequently use my personal example to stress the importance (as a symptom and a solution) of an uncluttered place to go home to.
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As I often say (and not long ago realized for me), “outer order creates inner calm”.
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I don’t think that’s what it is saying. Hoarding can definitely indicate mental illness, but the kind of mental illness crisis they’re discussing is of a different kind. Hoarding seems less a “crisis” than a chronic condition. My sibling has in the past suffered from severe depression, and her house was filled with junk. Filled. But she wasn’t “hoarding” it. She simply couldn’t make herself do anything about it. Wasn’t even putting garbage out.
My understanding is that hoarders have some kind of attachment to their junk (collections). They don’t want to get rid of it. Sis would have loved for it to be gone. Just could not make herself do it through her depression.
So to me, the distinction makes sense.
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