City official helped rethink treatment of hoarding
FORT WAYNE – Animals as victims was the prevailing wisdom when Belinda Lewis took charge of Fort Wayne Animal Care and Control 23 years ago and faced animal hoarding cases.
Today she lectures nationally on the topic, and the city is recognized as an early leader in addressing animal hoarding, not as a rescue mission but as a mental health disorder.
The 1980s were a time of change.
“With time and evolution, and it really did start back about that time, sociologists, psychologists, adult protective services began to recognize that we have a self-victimization going on from somebody who couldn’t help themselves and couldn’t get out of their circumstance, didn’t necessarily want to get out of their circumstance because they didn’t recognize it themselves,” Lewis said.
She credits a mental health official on the Animal Care and Control Commission for identifying hoarding as a mental health issue, prompting Lewis to initiate intervention in 1988. Various agencies – the health department, Neighborhood Code Enforcement, fire department, police department, mental health association, Park Center, adult protective services, child protective services – formally gathered to identify their roles.
All had been called on hoarding cases but there had been no joint effort before, Lewis said.
Dr. Gary J. Patronek, a veterinarian, researcher and national expert on animal hoarding, said he met Lewis at Purdue University.
They both are frequently on national panel discussions, he said.
The two were among 14 experts on a 2004 panel hosted by the Hoarding Animals Research Consortium that resulted in the report “Animal Hoarding: Structuring interdisciplinary responses to help people, animals and communities at risk.”
“In the day she seemed to be one of the few people in the country who was sort of taking a proactive approach to these situations and trying to involve other agencies and sort of craft workable solutions for all concerned,” Patronek said.
Although hard numbers aren’t available, Lewis suspects there are fewer hoarding cases in Fort Wayne than other cities its size because of the intervention efforts.
“I wouldn’t call it a formal approach now,” she said. “It’s just the method of doing business for everybody involved in our community and the recognition that in this community, the animals are really not the reason for the problem. The animals are a side effect of the behavior of the human individual and that all aspects of it need to be addressed.”
When most people think of drug overdose deaths, they think of overdoses from street drugs such as heroin and cocaine. It would be more apt to think of the pills in our medicine cabinets.