Diogenes syndrome. how to#

Diogenes syndrome. how to#

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This can make it hard to identify bodies, which will often be in an advanced state of decomposition. Typically isolated, most sufferers are not found for days or weeks after their death, and sometimes the authorities are only alerted months later. In winter, it is not unusual for sufferers to light cardboard and wooden boxes in an effort to keep warm, sometimes setting off fires in their homes. Of the handful of people with DS who are found dead each year in Spain, some die of starvation or illness, while others are sometimes buried alive when the garbage they amass collapses on top of them. What made José Ángel, 51, different to other sufferers was his online activity. At the beginning of this month, emergency services were called out to the home of a 79-year-old woman in Erandio, near Bilbao, who they assumed to be dead due to the stench from inside the property, although she died just minutes after they arrived.

Last January, a 62-year-old man from Asturias, along with an 84-year-old woman in Cáceres, were found in similar circumstances. José Ángel suffered from what is known as Diogenes Syndrome, a condition that drives people to compulsively hoard garbage.

The authorities in Madrid receive around 300 complaints a year about people hoarding trash in their homes