Compulsive Hoarding is No Laughing Matter
By brunoEver feel like your house is filling up with crap? Do you have trouble getting rid of things? Well, things could be worse:
From BadJason.com
And while the images of compulsive hoarders' homes can strike us as humorous by their sheer absurdity, this is a serious pyschological condition with dramatic consequences:
ABC News ran a piece this weekend on the psychology of compulsive hoarding (often correlated with obsessive-compulsive disorder). What was most interesting to me was evidence cited in the report showing hoarders have a reduced ability to group items into meaningful categories. What this means, essentially, is that for some compulsive hoarders, every item belongs in its own category, so it's almost impossible for them to organize their belongings and make decisions about what deserves to be saved and what doesn't.
On the other hand, hoarders show an unusually high capacity to locate spefic items; usually describing their location very precisely, and in graphical terms (i.e. three inches from the left on the middle table in the living room).
More resources:
Wikipedia - Compulsive Hoarding
The Psychology of Compulsive Hoarding
Langley Collyer: The Mystery Hoarder of Harlem
University of Minnesota's Impulse Control Disorders Clinic
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Hey, my name is Bruno and I'm the founder of Curbly.com. I started this site...
h0arders0n
Hi Bruno,
Thanks for posting the hoarding video. I'm the voice in the video, and that's my mom's house. I really appreciate you helping to get the word out about how serious of a problem that hoarding can be. If any of your readers are interested in more information, they can check out my blog at http://hoardersson.blogspot.com/ or visit the Children of Hoarders website.
PS. There is more information about the video at http://hoardersson.blogspot.com/2007/01/hallway.html
jasimar
Keter
I grew up in a household dominated by 2 women who hoarded despite having lots of money. The piles filled a 5000 square foot house, barn, workshop, and a huge enclosed porch, stacked to the ceiling with junk with only paths to walk through.
Saying that hoarding is because people can't sort into categories is absolutely correct. They put stuff in boxes, but ALL of the boxes were unsorted junk boxes. But they were not good at finding stuff. When they couldn't find something, they bought another, making the problem worse. They couldn't get rid of anything, including stuff that was broken or even nasty. They were also compulsive buyers and bought only in multiples.
Hoarding definitely is almost always a symptom of deeper psychological disorder: My mother was addicted to multiple prescription drugs as well as shopping, and my grandmother was so agoraphobic that she refused to even be seen in the front yard. Different people hoard different things: the crazy cat lady or out of control animal rescuer is a type of hoarder.
I once knew a young man with 27 cats who also hoarded other junk…he was well on his way to creating a world class mess. His mother had every square inch of her house devoted to knick-knack collections. I also knew a middle aged woman who could throw away stuff, but couldn’t organize anything, but she could find a needle in a haystack. Her son was literally born schizophrenic. From this observation, I’m pretty sure that the hoarding defect is both organic and genetic. I’m also pretty sure that it’s not a learned behavior, because I was adopted, and am a polar opposite--a hyper-organized Zen modernist. ;o)
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