A Service set up in Wollongong to tackle hoarding and squalor has attracted 26 referrals in four months, many of them for families with children.Clients of the service include a woman in her 60s who hasn’t had a visitor for three years and another woman whose home fell into disarray after she suffered a miscarriage and apparently lost the will to maintain a household.Staff from the service are among those joining a two-day conference in Sydney from today to discuss a national strategy on hoarding, including discussion of whether it should be internationally recognised as a psychiatric disorder.Amy Leo, senior coordinator of the Illawarra Hoarding and Squalor program, believes a classification would make it easier to help hoarders - people who collect excessively and have an extreme inability to discard worthless objects including, sometimes, rubbish.‘‘There’s always a catalyst,’’ said Miss Leo, of Catholic Community Services.‘‘We have clients who have had a child pass away or had a miscarriage.‘‘Things they used to see as important are no longer important in the scheme of things because of these tragedies.’’ The Wollongong-based service covers the Illawarra and Shoalhaven and is run by Miss Leo and two part-time care workers with a $300,000 budget provided over 18 months by the State Government.Similar services have operated since 2008 in Sydney and the Hunter region.‘‘We reconnect them with their community - which may be as simple as getting them to see their GP or social interest group - going back to church, anything that we can do to get their life back on track,’’ Miss Leo said.‘‘At the same time we’re working on the condition of their house.’’ This can involve long sessions spent going through items one-by-one, discussing their value. Caseworkers also discuss how to keep a house organised, help with cleaning or bring in professional cleaning services. ‘‘If you look at the media portrayal, like the show Hoarders, going in and cleaning a house in a week doesn’t help because it doesn’t help the person with their issues,’’ Miss Leo said.‘‘We can only get rid of the stuff by helping the person.’’The Illawarra service is for people with a mental illness or disability, or those aged over 65.Referrals: 1800 225 474.