The Man Who Couldn’t Stop (9 page)

Intelligent and well-educated, both brothers had attended nearby Columbia University; Homer was a lawyer and Langley an engineer. But after their mother died in 1929 they became recluses and hid in the house at 2078 Fifth Avenue behind windows they boarded up and booby traps they set to deter intruders. Homer lost his sight in 1934 and his brother became his keeper. Their father had been a doctor – he would paddle the canoe to work along the Harlem River – and, surrounded by his medical books, Langley saw no need for outside assistance. Doctors, he feared, would remove his brother's optic nerve, and so leave no hope of recovery. Instead, Langley fed Homer a diet of oranges, more than a hundred each week. The piles and piles of newspapers, he said, were for his brother to read when he recovered.

Their parents had been wealthy property owners and the brothers were rich, but they hated to waste money, Langley especially. Rather than pay for the subway, he would walk the New York streets as far as Brooklyn, and drag a box behind to scavenge junk. The last time the brothers were seen outside the house together was when they carried a fallen tree through Manhattan. After thieves broke into their home, they never left the house unattended again. The rooms were so full of their stuff that during an attempt to evict them, a locksmith managed to penetrate just two feet into their house in three hours.

In recent years, television programmes have profiled hoarders, some of whom have become minor celebrities. Homer and Langley were genuine stars. After a society reporter called Helen Worden introduced them to a captivated city in 1938, for years everything they did was news – along with some of the things they didn't. When neither brother showed his face after a nearby property caught fire, the city newspaper
The Sun
ran the headline: ‘Recluses Calm Despite Blaze: Collyer Brothers Show No Interest In Fire Next Door'. Their secretive nature only magnified interest, together with wild stories of the treasure they sat on. Yet burglars who did break into the house found no swag worthy of the crime.

Langley was sometimes accompanied by journalists on his nightly excursions. One time, a reporter showed him around the
Herald Tribune
office on West 41st Street, where the supposed hermit was fascinated by the presses, had his photograph taken and lectured staff there on the principles of printing. He dismissed the stories that swirled about him and his brother. The windows were boarded, he said, because local children smashed them otherwise. He and Homer, he said, just wanted to live their lives their own way. His old and shabby clothes were a defence. ‘Dressed like this, no one ever molests me.' Dropped back at his house by the reporter in a taxi, Langley stopped to pick up scraps of paper and broken glass on his way into the house. ‘It's the same every night. Rubbish in the yard.' The paper wrote this of them: ‘Two brothers – indrawn, sufficient unto each other, leading the life they choose, following a rationality all their own.'

On 21 March 1947, police received an anonymous call about a dead body in the house. Patrolman William Barker broke in through an upstairs window and crawled for two hours through wall-to-wall clutter, including cardboard boxes and umbrellas tied together, until he found Homer Collyer, dead in a tatty blue and white bathrobe, his head resting on his knees. Some speculated that Langley had murdered his brother and scarpered – sightings of him were reported in nine states. But the police continued to search the house, pulling out box after box of stuff the brothers had held onto – old phone books, an early X-ray machine, a cavalry sabre, thirteen ornate mantel clocks, two pipe organs, five violins, their mother's unfinished knitting and a horse's jawbone. Outside, efforts to clear away the brothers' stuff and so gain access to the house produced a growing pile of bric-a-brac and collected rubbish on the sidewalk. That and the stench from the house drew a crowd of six hundred people.

Langley's body was discovered by a workman on 8 April – more than two weeks after that of his brother, yet just a few feet away, partially decomposed and gnawed by rats, covered in three large bundles of newspapers. He was wearing a red bathrobe over four pairs of trousers but no underwear. Bringing food to his older brother, by then paralysed with rheumatism, Langley had been caught and crushed by an avalanche of junk from one of his own booby traps. Homer starved to death a few days later. Both were buried with their parents in the family plot at Brooklyn's Cypress Hill cemetery.

The city tore their house down and the site is now a park that bears their name. After learning about their lives, I visited to pay my respects in February 2013. It's a scruffy rectangle of grass and trees with a plaque that explains its past life mounted on the railings that separate it from the street. Just three blocks from the colourful chaos of 125th Street, the cultural artery of Harlem, it's difficult to imagine Homer inside the house, helpless and calling to his trapped brother with increased desperation, unable even to lift his arms to pull at the mounds of their precious belongings that became their prison.

Local officials have tried to rename the park. The Collyer brothers, they say, are a poor advert for modern Harlem: terrible role models for the city's new generation. Feared and misunderstood in life, Homer and Langley are scorned even in death, for following a rationality all of their own.

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Hoarding is one of twenty or so separate conditions that scientists link to OCD. Just as autism is now considered a spectrum of related syndromes, so OCD is believed to sit on its own spectrum, alongside other conditions linked either by the presence of intrusive thoughts or by seemingly compulsive behaviours. In fact, some psychologists suggest that autism itself is an OCD spectrum disorder. Autism can feature a need to observe rigid routines and rituals, and some autistic patients report both obsessions and compulsions.

Some conditions on this OCD spectrum are neurological disorders. These tend not to feature the distressing thoughts of OCD, but they do show enough superficial similarities – repetitive and unwanted behaviour for example − for scientists to look at how they might be related. Tourette's syndrome is one of these.

Contrary to the way it's usually portrayed, only about a tenth of the people with Tourette's syndrome compulsively shout out swear words. Mostly it is a condition of tics – persistent and involuntary physical jerks, twitches and repetition of noises and phrases. It's been known about for almost two centuries and today is found in about one in every hundred children. The tics don't come from out of nowhere – they are described by those who have them as similar to the urges we all get to sneeze and yawn. We might resist them for a while, but the feeling builds until some form of release is inevitable. To carry out the tic then brings great, but temporary, relief.

Some scientists put Parkinson's disease on the OCD spectrum. Parkinson's is not a form of OCD. It is well characterized as a neurodegenerative disorder that shows itself with tremors and rigidity. But some patients with Parkinson's do show symptoms intriguingly similar to compulsions. Some Parkinson's patients can find it impossible to resist unwanted urges to line up pebbles, or to repeatedly dismantle and assemble doorknobs. Others develop impulsive behaviour, usually after treatment with drugs. A 68-year-old Argentine woman who was treated for Parkinson's developed both compulsive shopping and kleptomania. She began a teleshopping habit and had what she described as an uncontrollable fascination to shoplift cosmetics and beauty products. Other Parkinson's patients develop compulsive gambling habits.

Impulsive behaviours sit on the OCD spectrum too. There's an important difference between compulsive and impulsive acts: motivation. While compulsions are the repetitive performance of apparently senseless actions, impulses are better viewed as a tendency to act quickly and without regard for the consequences. They often bring some kind of pleasure or reward, at least at first. Sex is often impulsive, and plenty of psychologists treat problematic sexual behaviour as an impulse-control disorder.

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Marie was a sexsomniac. It started one night in France when Marie's husband Lee woke at 2 a.m. to find her violently beating and manipulating his penis. He described her mental state during the attack as confused, though probably not as confused as Lee's. In the morning, Marie couldn't remember a thing. It worsened. She tried to push marbles into his anus and Lee woke in intense pain to find three padlocks placed around his penis and testicles. One night, Marie produced bits of a mincing machine. After several years, the couple, who had three children, went for help to a hospital in Dijon – she with feelings of shame, despair and guilt and he, not unreasonably, with feelings of worry.

Sexsomnia is considered a type of parasomnia, or unusual behaviour in sleep. It's very much on the fringe of the conditions linked to OCD, but it's similar to other types of uncontrolled and impulsive sexual behaviour, which are more relevant. Some experts see common ground between OCD and incessant use of Internet pornography, for instance, or regular encounters with prostitutes. We might roll our eyes when a movie star exposed as a serial philanderer tearfully says he will seek help for his problem, but the psychological issue of sex addiction is widely recognized. It's one of a number of nonparaphilic sexual behaviours. These tend to be unrestrained forms of culturally and legally acceptable practices, usually consensual sex and masturbation.
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Matt was a 48-year-old pastor at a small suburban church in the United States. Married with a child, Matt would masturbate to online pornography up to three times a day. Church members noticed Matt was not around. He missed board meetings and racked up huge bills on pornographic websites. He would get up late at night and head for his study after his wife, Karen, had gone to sleep. One night, Karen, who had noticed mysterious charges on their credit card statement, walked in on him. Matt went for help the next day.

There has been little research on nonparaphilic sexual behaviours, but, as Matt's case shows, there is one important difference from OCD – and one related to the difference between impulsive and compulsive acts. Matt was aroused by his impulses and went out of his way to encourage them. That he didn't fight his thoughts meant that he didn't have OCD.

Other sexual thoughts, however arousing, can be resisted, and those do sometimes lead to OCD. Robert worked in a bank and had been happily married for seventeen years. Yet when an attractive female customer walked in, Robert could not help but think of her naked. Robert didn't like it. He found the thoughts immoral and inconsistent with the love he felt for his wife. He interpreted them as signs that he was an unfaithful husband and, to keep them away, he would avoid shopping malls and other places where he might see women. In the end, he told his wife – so she would stop him if he began to act upon his thoughts.

Faulty impulse control can also drive conditions such as pathological gambling and pyromania. Jean Esquirol, the nineteenth-century French psychiatrist who saw Mademoiselle F. and promoted monomania, was interested in these phenomena too. Together with his student Charles Marc, Esquirol reported the case of a woman who compulsively stole from Paris shops. Esquirol and Marc called her a ‘kleptomaniac', and though they are generally credited with inventing the term, reports of apparently compulsive theft go back to 1816 and the Swiss physician Andre Mathey, who wrote of patients with a ‘unique madness characterized by the tendency to steal without motive and without necessity'. Today, kleptomania is much rarer than OCD. Kleptomaniacs are typically older than conventional shoplifters, who usually steal for personal gain, and − just like people with Tourette's − they report a rise in tension before the theft, and a sense of relief afterwards. Similar is compulsive shopping, or compulsive buying as psychologists prefer to call it. It briefly appeared in psychiatric textbooks a century or so ago under the term ‘oniomania' (onios is Greek for ‘for sale').

A particularly distressing impulse control disorder is trichotillomania, which makes people pull out their own hair, frequently to the point where it produces visible bald spots that they cover with a wig. They usually remove hair from their head, but some people pluck out their eyelashes and tug at their pubic region. They are not always aware of what they do – one man treated for severe hair-pulling looked down while he drove and was astonished to see the dashboard covered in his own hair. Some eat the hair; one 34-year-old woman in Turkey did so for more than a decade, until surgeons were forced to remove a hair ball that completely filled her stomach. When trichotillomania produces hair balls that extend beyond the stomach and loop down into the intestinal tract, doctors call it Rapunzel syndrome. It takes its name from a fairy tale, but Rapunzel syndrome can kill.

Then there is skin-picking disorder, which sees people compulsively scratch at spots, scabs and other bumps and blemishes, sometimes for several hours a day and even while they sleep. A third of skin pickers chew and swallow the bits they pull away. Some use tools – needles, pins, razor blades and staple removers. The results can be near-fatal. A man in the eastern United States once had to rush his skin-picking middle-aged wife to hospital because he thought she had been shot. He came home to find her with what looked like a gaping bloody bullet hole in her neck.

His wife had become obsessed with what she described as a pimple on her neck and would scratch at it with her fingernails. On that day she picked at it with tweezers and worked her way through the skin. She continued, and dug her way through the tissue underneath, until she reached muscle. A tweezers-grab of flesh at a time, she went on until she exposed and nearly pierced her carotid artery. Had she done so, she almost certainly would have bled to death.

The woman was an intelligent, articulate accountant and normal in every way, bar one. She was utterly delusional when it came to the appearance of her skin. She had started to pick at it when she was 44, and was frustrated because every doctor she saw failed to understand she did it not to self-harm but to improve herself, to remove defects. She would point at normal patches of her face and insist they were unusual. She refused to acknowledge even the possibility that her perception of blemishes was exaggerated. In reality, the only imperfections were the scars from her picking that dotted her legs, arms and face.