Melodie is a 49 year old woman who due to a traumatic brain
injury at a young age, has many troubles regarding her brain
functioning, with a focus on her short term memory and problems with
her cognitive abilities. The side effects of her brain injury and
additional difficulties(including ADHD and OCD) as caused her to
start hoarding and cluttering.
Sandi Gates, an San Francisco Fire
Inspector, had this to say about Melodie: "Melodie(sic "She") is not
the typical hoarder(which I have worked with). Melodies hoarding is
secondary to her brain injury limitations. Her brain injury has left
her unable to recall the location of physical objects. She would not
have 7 toasters, if she knew where the first one was."
Melodie's
hoarding behavior is something she has repetitively asked, and tried
to get help with but her memory problems make this difficult, in
addition to many people misunderstanding the ways her disability
truly causes her to function. Through In Home Support Services she
has had several home support providers, who either never
stayed long enough to be affective or, didn't understand what
Melodie needed and only did what they *THOUGHT* she needed according
to their definition of needs.
Although a few of these workers have
listened or been mildly affective many have either argued that
what she needs is not that, or just not listened at all. Melodie has
been trying to work with the IHSS workers since 2001 with little to
no benefit, things became worse when her landlord used a lack of
fire egress to start harassing Melodie about her clutter.
This built
up until November 17th 2000, Adult Protective Services along with
her landlord arranged a dumpster to be placed outside and began
hauling *ANYTHING* made of cardboard or wood and it's contents into
the dumpster. Imagine someone coming into your house and just
throwing away what they want completely without knowledge of
what was important.
This was all happening just as Melodie had
organized almost all of the belongings of her house into like items
and was able to decipher what was important and not. This left
Melodie's life, house, and possessions tossed around disheveled and
in general a mess.
For the next six years Melodie tried to recover
the best she could but was never able to reach that same state of
organization or even anything near it, due to the restrictions set
forth by her landlord. This all came to a head when in 2007
Melodie was given a 10 day notice to "cure or quit".
After trying to
get help from several advocates and one day in court a settlement
was arrived of either be evicted immediately(04-04-07), or
vacate the premises by July 6th 2007 and receive 5,000 dollars(1,000
by 04-09-07 and 4,000 by 07-06-07{which she never received due to
supposed damages})
This has left her in her current state of
homeless, with her possessions haphazardly spread into three
separate storages.