Diogenes Syndrome

Diogenes syndrome is a behavioral pattern, seen predominantly in older adults, marked by extreme self-neglect, severe domestic squalor, social withdrawal and isolation, and often the compulsive hoarding of possessions, rubbish or animals, with the affected person frequently showing little apparent awareness of or concern about the severity of their own living conditions. The British researchers A. N. G. Clark, A. H. Mankikar and I. Gray gave the syndrome its name in a 1975 paper describing a series of such cases among elderly patients, choosing the name of the ancient Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes, who was famous for living with almost no possessions at all, a choice widely noted since as something of a misnomer, since the syndrome is at least as strongly associated with accumulating possessions as with rejecting them. Diogenes syndrome is not a formal diagnostic category in current psychiatric classification systems, but a descriptive clinical term used mainly within geriatric medicine and geriatric psychiatry. It is frequently, though not universally, associated with an underlying condition such as dementia, frontal lobe dysfunction, alcohol use disorder or another psychiatric illness, though a meaningful proportion of documented cases occur in people with no diagnosable cognitive or psychiatric disorder at all, complicating both its clinical understanding and questions about how and whether to intervene, since many affected individuals actively resist offers of help or changes to their living situation.