Piled up objects, mountains of waste, unsanitary apartment… Bastien suffered from Diogenes syndrome for eight years. He tells this story to Journal des Femmes.
Bastien is 36 years old and runs a rotisserie on the markets in the Paris region. He earns 5,000 euros per month and goes traveling several times a year. And overnight, everything changes. Bastien starts drinking… too much. “Overnight, I found myself in precarious circumstances, almost on the street. I lost my colleagues, my friends, my customers, my neighbors… I isolated myself, I no longer had any plans. I approached the large retail sector to apply for a department manager position but all the chain managers told me that I would not be able to accept orders since I had been a company manager.”
Bastien spends 8 months without activities. “As a former individual entrepreneur, I was not entitled to unemployment and I only received RSA after the third month. In the meantime, I went to the Restos du coeur and the social grocery store to be able to feed myself.” he tells us. That’s when he started collecting objects from right and left, plastic chairs, pieces of wood to make shelves, cushions… in short, things that he thought he would need sooner or later. These objects pile up little by little in his 25 m2 studio until they fill it entirely.
“I came to the point of throwing waste on the ground”
“I did less and less cleaning, I drank more and more alcohol and I sank into depression. I was in denial, I bought trash bags to sort and throw away but when I wanted to get started, I couldn’t. It’s as if a wire had disconnected in my brain, I had a blockage. As I could no longer find the trash can, I ended up throwing trash on the ground.” Bastien spends four years in the middle of this apartment which has become unbreathable. One day, he searches for “compulsive accumulation” on the Internet and realizes that he suffers from Diogenes syndrome.
At that time, illness was seen as that of the dirty and the lazy. So Bastien lives as a recluse, not inviting anyone. “I had to push the door with my shoulder to get into my apartment. I would turn down the sound on the television when someone walked past my house to pretend I wasn’t there. I lived in fear and insecurity, with windows and shutters closed” he remembers. But Bastien wants to get out of it. He consults an addiction psychiatrist and follows cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). Nothing works.
He contacted an “extreme cleaning” company but regretted the methods. “I was asked if there was room to put a skip outside my house, I found this lack of discretion and kindness very evocative. All these companies are interested in is showing before and afters on TikTok,” he denounces. Having managed to quit alcohol thanks to the community, he began looking for an association to help him declutter his apartment.
“He saved me”
Pierre Ludosky, the president of the Diogene Asso association, then extends his hand. “He entered my house with simple overshoes, he was not wearing a diving suit as we can see in the television reports, then he confirmed that I was indeed suffering from Diogenes syndrome, which no one had done before. He had a better role than all the psychiatrists and psychologists I had consulted until then” explains Bastien, full of gratitude.
The decluttering was done in consultation with Bastien, to find out what he wanted to throw away and what not. “All the items were cleaned and put back on furniture, it was up to me to put them back in the right place when they left” he continues. As for the price, the small inheritance he had just received from his grandmother proved sufficient. “Nothing was thrown away as is, everything was carefully wrapped beforehand in very thick and opaque garbage bags so that the neighbors would not suspect anything.”
Today, Bastien considers himself stable. “I sometimes have a bit of a mess, like everyone else, but it’s no longer a pain to throw away. I have put in place strict rules: no more objects on the floor. As soon as the coffee table is full, I don’t put anything on the floor. I also refuse when people want to give me objects” he confides. His financial situation has also improved. Now he works to help people with this syndrome.
