Growing up when your mother is a hoarder.

“I had a bedroom, but it wasn’t my bedroom.”

“It had four walls and my bed but I couldn’t go in and play. I made a pathway through to the bed but eventually everything got so piled up I couldn’t lie down.”

Sarah Pinheiro’s earliest memories aren’t of an event or a moment but of things.

Of clutter.

Of piles of furniture and clothing. Of reams of junk, boxes.  Animal faeces. Newspapers, catalogues, rubbish.

Of rats and mice and cockroaches.

Her home.

Now aged 31 she has spoken to The Age about what it was like to grow up as the child of a hoarder in Victoria alongside 52 guinea pigs, three cats, chickens, rabbits, dogs, mice and rats.

“When I lived there you couldn’t even see the back wall,” she said.

She explained that to have a shower she had to climb out over the rubbish to get to the bathroom, and that eventually, as her mother’s problem got worse, the ensuite was the only room in the house her mother could sleep in as it had the only space.

Sarah explained that as a child she was too afraid to go near the freezer as stored there, among the frozen peas and ice cubes was Fred, her pet cockatoo. When he died her mother wrapped him in plastic and placed him in the freezer and there he lay for years.

She told The Age that her childhood was spent missing out, she couldn’t have friends over to visit, nor do ordinary things other children did. She says that her only relief was ballet, but that she was constantly scared.

Frightened of people finding out about the state of her home, frightened of the sounds of the rats and mice who scurried through her home as she slept, frightened of the broken glass and metal that she cut her feet on when she moved through the house.

She said she would be hungry but be unable to get near the kitchen through the piles of junk that filled the corridors.

Sarah grew up in a home like this. Image via YouTube.

Sarah told of how her brother had to remove the fly screen off his second-storey bedroom window and use a ladder to come and go as it was too hard to get through the home.

"You know something's wrong when your mother picks up five of every recipe card every time she goes to the supermarket but never cooks anything, and then you get in trouble for throwing one away," Sarah told The Age.

She said she tried to smuggling out rubbish each day in her backpack dumping it in the bin on the way to school, but it was fruitless.

Her brother went on to catching rotavirus iglesia, a severe gastrointestinal disease normally contracted in third world countries when he was nine.

She told The Age "He was drying out, his body shrivelled up like a sultana," "It was lucky one of the doctors at the hospital had seen it before."

Her story is similar to that of a five-year-old boy who died in Melbourne in 2012 after contracting a serious bacterial infection after cutting his toe on an open tin of cat food left on the floor of his parents’ home. Their house was so squalid it was described as “unfit for an animal to live in, let alone a human”.

When police attended the home they said that every room of the house was covered with household rubbish, rotting food and opened cans of pet food.

There was human and animal faeces smeared on the walls, broken furniture, upended chairs, hundreds of bags of rotting, rodent-infested rubbish were piled up and broken toys were everywhere.

Both men and women hoard.  Image via "Hoarders"

Studies have shown that compulsive hoarding affects up to 6 percent of the population - both male and female equally.

Hoarding is now recognised as its own mental health disorder and can also be associated with are obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and depression.

Occasionally hoarding may be associated with an eating disorder, pica (eating non-food materials), Prader-Willi syndrome (a genetic disorder), psychosis, or dementia.

People with hoarding disorder excessively save items that others may view as worthless. They have persistent difficulty getting rid of or parting with possessions, leading to clutter that disrupts their ability to use their living or work spaces. The behaviour usually has harmful effects — emotional, physical, social, financial, even legal — for the person suffering from the disorder and for family members.

Matt Paxton, an extreme cleaning specialist famous for his role on the TV show “Hoarders,” has often spoken of the extreme hoarders go to.

One house with an estimated 150,000 litres of urine stored in jugs, the one with 300 cats and a methane level so high firefighters couldn’t even measure it, the one with 60 dead cats jammed into a refrigerator, the carcasses liquefying, like vegetables left too long.

He told Toronto 24hours."What causes hoarding is grief and trauma. Something bad has happened to you, and you look for your happiness and self-worth in stuff. It’s no different than someone that’s a drug addict or gambling addict or an alcoholic, and they’re looking for their self-worth and their happiness in those drugs. For hoarders, their brains just happen to go to stuff.”

The families are left to deal with the mess at times.  Image via "Hoarders"

But the often forgotten victims are the families.

On a website devoted to children of hoarders other voices, like Sarah’s speak out.

One woman writing:” The guilt and shame associated with hoarding is sometime unbearable the shame a child of a hoarder carries is heavy.  The stigma and misunderstanding of hoarding is widespread.  As a child of a hoarder I spent all my time at my friend's houses, I know that their parents had to of wondered why their kids were never at my house, maybe they knew, maybe they were to scared to talk about it. “

Another says, “My Mother was a single Mother and hoards everything in the name of - "I might need that one day!"  I have this constant dread that she will pass and I will be left alone (only child) to clean out her home.”

And more: “I have told her she is choosing her things over a relationship with me, but she insists that it is me who is doing the choosing.”

“Her room is so bad that all the things she piles on her bed everyday she can't always fit on the floor and she has to sleep on the couch. You have to climb over her bed to get to anything of hers.”

Hoarding affects 6% of the population. Image via "Hoarders"

For Sarah, who left home at the age of 16, the legacy of her mother’s hoarding continues as she questions why she was left in her childhood home with no one intervening.

"Why did they all leave me there?" she asks.

She is now determined to speak out to help any child in a situation similar to hers.

"If I could ever help anyone through this, I would," she told The Age. "No child should have to live the way we did as children."

For help: Lifeline 13 11 14. Kid's Helpline: 1800 55 1800.