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Hi guys, my name is Nick, nice to meet you all. I am sort of making this post on the behalf of my long time friend, his fiancee, and my friend's mother. My hope is that in making this post I will get some advice for all of use, and hopefully rally us together in support of his mother. In advance, i do apologize if I state something in an offensive, or unpolitically correct way, as i am new to this situation; although, i promise to not purposely do so.
I have known my friend for about 15 or 16 years, we grew up together. His mother has had a hoarding problem for about 14 years I believe, and it started when her father died. I know for sure that my friend has tried to help her many times, and has the stance now that she has to fix her problems herself.
He moved out of her house about 5 or 6 years ago. I am not sure how much this situation bothers him now, but I do know that it did bother him while he was growing up.
The situation seems pretty bad to those of us that have been over, but not many of us have seen the whole scale of things (just my friend). We are especially concerned about the mental and physical health of her and his little brother (now 17), as well as the animals that are in the house.
I would like to address that at first glance, perhaps this is none of my business and that maybe I should butt out. Part of me does feel like that is true, but another part of me does see a wide range of negative impacts, on both their immediate family as well as their extended family (myself included, as i am dating his fiancee's sister). One of the reasons that I am concerned is that my friend and his fiancee are going to have a baby in a couple of weeks and I know how my friend's fiancee feels about allowing their baby daughter over to see her grandmother, as well as even meeting her in another location due to personal hygiene concerns. I can really see this whole situation really coming to a very unfortunate end, and a large part of it leading back to the hoarding, and the mental health problems inciting it. As a side note, there are more specific concerns about my friend's brother's mental health....
All that being said I am trying to get us all together and on the same page to see if we could find her some help, but I am not very knowledgeable about many things, including the exact situation, or even how to go about being able to help.
My initial thought is that the first thing that needs to happen is attempting to try to talk to her to see if she will be willing to attempt to see a councilor, or willing to try to force her son into seeing a councilor. My thought is that if we could get that to happen it would be a great start to improving the situation at home, as well as improving the relationships of all parties involved. I believe that there are probably several steps in this process.
My initial thoughts on attempting to get her to get some help is that there are several options.... just talking to her to see if we can show her that we care and think there is a problem.... showing tough love by letting the situation go on and not helping or being involved.... and to stop all enabling that is going on.
In the end what course that is taken is not my decision. As a final note, I am aware that NO ONE can force her to get help or help her to get help if she does not want to, but it would be nice to know that we had really, really tried to do our best to help her.
Any advice, or resources you guys could point us to would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance, and thank you for taking your time to read this!
-Nick
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