Cleaning with Depression

One of the things that we see on almost a daily basis is how someone’s poor mental health and living with depression is affecting their ability to maintain a clean and safe environment to live in. There are many mental health conditions that symptoms affect someone’s living conditions, I talked in another blog about trauma and PTSD around cleaning but the most common mental health issue that influences peoples cleanliness is depression. Depression isn’t a one size fits all kind of illness. Everyone will experience depression differently. If you have ever experienced depression yourself or witnessed a love one live with depression I think you’d agree that very often one of the main symptoms is low mood, low energy, low motivation. Some people are just about able to function to maintain a job or look after children but that takes a lot out of them of mentally and physically so when they have downtime they don’t have the motivation to do much cleaning or tidying. This is very common. We have worked with many professionals with high power/stressful careers and their house is the lowest priority. In really severe case the person may be struggling to even function, getting out of bed each day and their own personal hygiene and self care might be suffering so the last thing on their mind is cleaning the bathroom. Then it becomes a vicious cycle. They have no energy or motivation to clean up but the dirt, mess and chaos makes their mental health spiral even lower. Breaking that cycle is key but it is often much easier said than done. Another factor I have seen with my own eyes in self sabotage. Sometimes people feel so incredibly ashamed of themselves and are so full of self hatred that they don’t feel like they deserve a clean and tidy environment to live in. They deliberately create an unhygienic, messy and chaotic environment because they don’t feel like they deserve anything else. Fundamentally someone’s living environment is a reflection of their mind. The saying “tidy house tidy mind” is true and it works the other way as well. If people can either break the cycle themselves or get someone to help with the housework for them it will undoubtedly improve their mental health in the long term.