Where to begin... my mother has not been formally diagnosed with anything other than depression and as being a hoarder. However in recent months I feel that she suffers from a number of mental illness; paranoyer & mild dementia. Firstly about the hoarding... when I say my mother is hoarder, I mean like her home is undeniably unliveable. I look around and I see a crazy lady living in filth with boxes and the most ridiculous junk towering everywhere. I see rotting fruit in the kitchen, mouse poo on the kitchen table and I just absolutely want to scream and yell "what the f$%k is wrong with you... how can you actually think this is okay?!" She denies she is compulsive obsessive but I start to predict her behaviour. She'll leave my home.. and I'll count 20-30 secs knowing she will return to say one last thing... or we'll talk about something and she'll want to write it down like she's the most organised person in the world, then if you see her home you wonder where the hell she filed that little piece of paper. I get angry and I just want to say "Why bother writing it down, you'll just lose it in that horrible tip for a house you live in?" But then that would be a personal attack so I am ever so holding my tongue. Anyone who reads this will probably think to themselves that I have so much anger. Yes, today I do. All my siblings and I are equally angry about her addiction to hoarding and now all of the other strange mentally ill things she does. I just don't know how to deal with my mother any more. I don't see her as a motherly figure. I see her as a woman who is very sick and needs to be on some sort of medication and needs to be FORCED to clean up her house. I even feel like calling the health department and telling them to give her a notice to get her to get her act together. It's not as easy as simply "helping her". She is so **** stubborn and frustrating you can't help her. She wants to do everything her way and in the end, nothing gets thrown away or moved. She is sabotaging her own life. Her paranoyer is starting to bother me very much because she will talk about people who are supposedly plotting to do something against malicious to her or in their favour. She then obsesses about it and I have to listen to repeat stories and I just quickly cut her off and tell her I already heard the story. Then she'll launch into depressive stories about her sad childhood. How many times in my life I've heard the same self pitiful stories. I can't endure it and yet if I don't spend time with her (because no one else will) she will get more depressed. Her depression affects me. Quite often she will break down crying in public and make a scene. I just want to tell her "check into a god **** hospital or something... this is putting a lot of strain on me with her literally crazy behaviour and I just need a break from her or I need to talk to someone who can empathise going through the same things as me. I love my mum, I'm grateful my mother is still alive today but I am highly concerned she has early stages of dementia and I don't know how to tell her how her behaviour is making me feel. She just gets defensive then plays victim. She is actually a victim of her own hand in life. Never does she take any accountability for the choices which have lead her to the point she is at today. Never does she own up to creating the problem/ addiction she has today. It's always some external reason, someone else's fault for emotionally hurting her. I feel like telling her, you're just like a drug addict with your hoarding. Until you take ownership for your problem you're never going to recover. I am fearful that the house will continue to fill up and that it will only be clean after she is dead or in a nursing home. God help me if she doesn't clean the house herself :(