A property in Paddington that is overrun with junk and other items.

When Joanna moved to Australia from England at 21, she never thought her life would follow in her mother’s hoarding footsteps.

Marrying an Englishman in Melbourne, the couple upgraded their living space from a one-bedroom apartment to a three-bedroom home in Sydney, which was where the obsessive collecting began.

“I was working at a travel company, and I would become quite stressed at the office,” Mrs Dunbar-Poole told news.com.au.

“The stress lead to collecting, and I started to pick out newspapers from bins on the way to work. It’s been 35 years, and I’ve never read them but they are still piled in boxes in my house.”

A scene from Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners, which shows a typical scenes of papers piled high within the home.Source:YouTube

Mrs Dubar-Poole, who still lives in her home three decades later, never acknowledged that her growing collection of treasures was a problem.

As the towers of paper, dust and clothing piles grew, there was an emotional barrier that stopped her from throwing anything away. A barrier which she believes stemmed from her childhood.

“I started collecting silly things off the ground to bring home. My mother would say to me as a child that if I wanted to throw something out, a bottle, anything — it would cry. So that stayed with me, and if I saw something thrown out and alone, I’d think it would be lonely. So to stop that from happening, I’d collect it and bring it home.”

As a British woman, she didn’t like to put things to waste — but now sees how her ‘harmful’ habit turned into an addiction.

Joanna’s husband passed away from cardiac arrest while she was overseas for a short period of time several years ago. While it is unclear what caused the heart attack, Mrs Dunbar-Pool “blames the hoarding for his death”.

“While I’m not sure if something fell down and scared him, I still blame the hoarding for his death, and I only realised that when I got home and saw all this stuff piled up around me,” she said.

Taking part in the fourth National Hoarding and Squalor conference in Sydney today, Mrs Dunbar-Poole is part of a growing number of hoarders in Australia. Dr Randy Frost, who has been studying the characteristics and implications caused by hoarders for over 25 years, said between two and five per cent of people suffer from the disorder.

“Hoarding looks to be partly genetic influence,” Dr Frost told news.com.au.

“There are also some background characteristic checks, like depression, perfectionism, history of loss and trauma that may add to hoarding.

“The brain is wired differently, so when they are considering an object they look at it with too much information.

“They can’t distinguish what’s important from what’s irrelevant which, makes throwing an item away very difficult. For the most part, people with this problem never use the items they collect.”

The Bobolas family have had their property cleared on several occasions. Picture: Hollie Adams/The AustralianSource:News Corp Australia

The conference comes at a time when the condition of hoarding has dominated Sydney headlines.

Earlier this week, the infamous Bobolas family once again avoided the sale of their well-known rubbish-filled Bondi property with an 11th-hour cash payment.

Seventeen interested bidders were left disgruntled at an off-site location, after the property was pulled off the market just 20 minutes before its scheduled auction time; making it the fourth time the auction failed to go ahead.

The owner, Mary Bobolas, came up with the $160,000 which was needed to meet the property’s newest set of cleaning and legal bills, after the premises was cleared using 10 trucks in July last year.

Mary Bobolas in the front yard of her home in Boonara Avenue Bondi Junction. Picture: John AppleyardSource:News Corp Australia

But according to Dr Frost, a quick fix clean up only plays as a band aid solution to the problem.

“It’s important that people changing the condition of a property need to be doing so under a changed person,” he said.

“If you do the clear out, you have to expect that all the items removed will come back again.

“It’s hard from a family or community perspective, who often say ‘just throw it out’, but it’s so hard for these people to do that — and that’s whats so hard for people to understand.

“There is a stigma around hoarding which stops people from getting help because they know what people think.

“While it seems so simple, most of us throw things out without thinking, but some people just can’t let it go.”

A man on the NSW south coast is seeking help for what is now seen as a mental condition. Picture: Katrina WalshSource:Supplied

While Mrs Dunbar-Pool now accepts her hoarding as a serious problem, she still cannot bring herself to part with the clutter that spills from room to room.

“The carport and shed is full of items from 30 years ago,” she said.

“Inside the house, its hard to get through the passage ways because of suitcases, papers and brochures.

“At the moment, I can only get into one little corner of the living room. I can’t see my couch, table or reach the curtains. In my kitchen, I can get hot water but that’s it — it’s just another storage place.

“My bed is covered, so I sleep in one corner.

“The bath is full of things, all the spare rooms are piled high. I can still have a shower, but I even use that to store things sometimes too.”

Mrs Dunbar-Poole has turned to various avenues for help, but says the experts usually learn more from her than what she gets from them.

Today, she takes part in a program which assists hoarders from “all walks of life” in the hope of finding a way to deal with the condition that has consumed their lives.

“We are constantly looking for perfection, but once we start to collect it just turns to chaos,” she said.

“This condition just creeps up on you. They say it’s to do with loss, which is why I am holding on to objects.

“I have a lot of things that I know should go, but that will be a big production and it will take years. There’s always a drama to ruin my peace of mind and stopping me from going through things.

“Honestly, I don’t know how all this happened,” she said.

A property in Carnegie shows what impact serious hoarding can have on a property. Picture: Valeriu CampanSource:News Corp Australia

Dr Frost said a common characteristic with people who qualify as hoarders is the inability to let go of items that may hold some sentimental value — even if it’s a 20 year-old receipt no one can read.

“That sentimental value is extreme for hoarders, and these items are kept because people want to remember something in their lives,” he said.

“Often these items are used as visual cues to a memory, or because one day they may be useful. “The problem is, these objects are kept for projects, but they never get to that point.”

Mrs Dunbar-Poole falls in line with another station of hoarding, which sees a person collect objects because they are worried the item will be wasted if thrown away.

“They have to find a good problem with it to throw it out,” Dr Frost said.

“They have the idea that they ‘have to be responsible’ and use it completely and not waste or harm the object.

“It’s a mental disorder, and they need treatment to change their obsession with attachment. They don’t need sympathy, they need to understand what is the true value of possessions.”

Dr Frost is in Australia for the fourth annual National Hoarding and Squalor conference in Sydney.