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wow check it out.... treasures vs trash..... gold mine-
DUSTY OLD THING- Magazine
https://www.facebook.com/DustyOldThing/?fref=ts
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Hoarding: Trash as Treasure
When
a friend just can't let go—of plain old junk.
By
Hara Estroff Marano, published on July 9, 2007
I
have a friend who doesn't like to throw away things. He keeps stuff like empty
medicine bottles (approximately 100), 20-year-old bank statements, magazines
(some 300 issues), paper (six file cabinets and over 20 boxes), clothes as old
as 30 years, and so on. I suggested he throw them away but he gets very angry
at my suggestion. It got to the point that his girlfriend left him because of
his habit. Is this something that I should be concerned with? Is there a cure
for his behavior?
For
some people, collecting is a passion. For others, it's a disorder. There are 2
million compulsive hoarders in the United States for whom the impulse to
collect and save has gone dangerously awry.
The
desire to hold onto things is buried deep inside our psyches. For most of human
history, food and other resources were generally scarce. Our brains and
repertoire of behaviors took shape in an environment of
scarcity.
Hoarding, however, is the reflection of anxiety raised to
the fever pitch of obsession and compulsion. It pathologically capitalizes on
the virtue of saving and involves objects most others deem worthless or
useless. One or two empty prescription containers may come in handy, there is
no rational way to justify holding onto 100.
No one knows why hoarders alight on the things they do.
Some sufferers form emotional attachments to their belongings. Others are
indecisive, disorganized, and prone to procrastination. Either way, their attachment to
things is pathological when it begins to distort daily life or interfere with
relationships—say, there's no place for visitors to sit down. Your friend is
already well in that camp.
Hoarding behavior could arise on its own. Or it could be
triggered by a loss or other significant life event. It may also occur in
persons with dementia.
Most hoarders deny they have a problem. Your friend may
insist there will be a time when he'll need a bank statement from 20 years ago
or that his old clothes will come roaring back into style.
Compulsive hoarding is a treatable condition. Hoarders need
psychotherapy
that gets at the root of their anxiety. To help hoarders stop collecting and
start trashing, the therapy may be most effective if at some point it takes
place in the environment where the patient hoards. For some people, antidepressant drugs may
be used in conjunction with the therapy.
Diseases and Conditions-Hoarding
disorder
Symptoms
In the homes of people who have hoarding disorder, the
countertops, sinks, stoves, desks, stairways and virtually all other surfaces
are usually stacked with stuff. And when there's no more room inside, the
clutter may spread to the garage, vehicles and yard.
Clutter and difficulty discarding things are usually the
first signs and symptoms of hoarding disorder, which often surfaces during the
teenage years. As the person grows older, he or she typically starts acquiring
things for which there is no need or space. By middle age, symptoms are often
severe and may be harder to treat.
Hoarding disorder affects emotions, thoughts and behavior.
Signs and symptoms may include:
·
Persistent inability to part with any
possession, regardless of its value
·
Excessive attachment to possessions,
including discomfort letting others touch or borrow them or distress at the
idea of letting an item go
·
Cluttered living spaces, making areas of
the home unusable for the intended purpose, such as not being able to cook in
the kitchen or use the bathroom to bathe
·
Keeping stacks of newspapers, magazines or
junk mail
·
Letting food or trash build up to
unusually excessive, unsanitary levels
·
Acquiring unneeded or seemingly useless
items, such as trash or napkins from a restaurant
·
Difficulty managing daily activities
because of procrastination and trouble making decisions
·
Moving items from one pile to another,
without discarding anything
·
Difficulty organizing items, sometimes
losing important items in the clutter
·
Shame or embarrassment
·
Limited or no social interactions
People with hoarding disorder typically save items because:
·
They believe these items will be needed or
have value in the future
·
The items have important emotional
significance — serving as a reminder of happier times or representing beloved
people or pets
·
They feel safer when surrounded by the
things they save
Hoarding disorder is different from collecting. People who
have collections, such as stamps or model cars, deliberately search out
specific items, categorize them and carefully display their collections.
Although collections can be large, they aren't usually cluttered and they don't
cause the distress and impairments that are part of hoarding disorder.
Hoarding animals
People who hoard animals may collect dozens or even
hundreds of pets. Animals may be confined inside or outside. Because of the
large numbers, these animals often aren't cared for properly. The health and
safety of the person and the animals are at risk due to unsanitary conditions.
When to see a doctor
If you or a loved one has symptoms of hoarding disorder,
talk with a doctor or mental health provider as soon as possible. Some
communities have agencies that help with hoarding problems. Check with your
local or county government for resources in your area.
As hard as it might be, you may also need to contact local
authorities, such as police, fire, public health, child protective services or
animal welfare agencies, especially when health or safety is in question.
Symptoms Causes Risk factors Complications Preparing for your appointment Tests and diagnosis Treatments and drugs Lifestyle and home remedies Prevention
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UNITED KINGDOM
TEST YOURSELF-
Test yourself
On this page you'll find a collection links to checklists,
tests and surveys related to clutter and compulsive hoarding. Why not come back
every now and again to see how you are doing?
The Wade-Bennett life-clutter scale
What's going on in your life? Is there a connection between
trauma and out of control possessions?
Take the Wade-Bennett life-clutter test and and find the
events that may have lead you to clutter or hoard. Read more about the Wade-Bennett life-clutter
scale....
NEW! A genetic component to hoarding?
We've just started some research, can you help? It's just a
few questions about hoarding in your family.
This is about the kids...
Hoarding behaviour can be a problem early in life, this
quick survey asks about your children
and their stuff.
Hoarding and depression
Take our short survey about hoarding
and depression and how they affect your life.
A long-term problem?
Serious hoarding has been described as developing over
10-15 years.
Take our survey RIGHT NOW At
what age did clutter become a problem for you?
Personal stuff
Now this is a sensitive question we are asking. There is no
need to enter your name, address or email, it's completely anonymous. You can
always just take a look.....'When
was the last time you washed your bedlinen?
Why do you clutter or hoard?
Here's another question. Maybe know why, maybe you don't,
or it might be many reasons. What
do YOU think has caused you to clutter or hoard? We are fascinated
to find out and it might make you think, too!
Clutter checklist
Where's your clutter hiding? What are your clutter
hotspots? Can you find those important items? Find out how you score on the
Cluttergone website, with our light-hearted clutter
checklist.
You might also be interested in:
·
The books to read on hoarding disorder
·
The Cluttergone website
·
Measurement of compulsive hoarding - three
clinical hoarding scales
·
The Cluttergone
blog - read the true story of one of our clients
and
About Compulsive Hoarding
A very basic description of a compulsive hoarder is someone
unable to dispose of excess or unused things things to the point where their
belongings are clogging their living space.
Making a cup of tea, or sleeping in their own bed becomes
impossible because the spaces designed for living in have become storehouses.
Compulsive hoarding as a survival mechanism
Some hoarding situations can be part of survival
mechanisms. Traditional farming entails saving or ‘hoarding’ a harvest to last
through the winter, saving seed to be planted in the spring. Other animals
hoard. Squirrels gather nuts. Brain scans done on squirrels show activity in
the same areas as human hoarders.
Emergency candles, tinned goods and spare light bulbs are all useful things in moderation. With a compulsive hoarder these positive choices are taken to an extreme where they no longer have any meaning or use. The food kept by farmers for the winter will rot if not used. Old seed loses its ability to sprout. It is at this point that the psychological factors come into play.
Emergency candles, tinned goods and spare light bulbs are all useful things in moderation. With a compulsive hoarder these positive choices are taken to an extreme where they no longer have any meaning or use. The food kept by farmers for the winter will rot if not used. Old seed loses its ability to sprout. It is at this point that the psychological factors come into play.
Compulsive hoarding manifestations
The most familiar manifestation of hoarding is what is
known in animal research as a 'cache'. This version is the one most often
depicted in the media: a house over full with stuff coming out the doors and
windows. The hoarder protects it all. There is another animal hoarding
behaviour known as 'cache spacing' which is used by 'scatter hoarders'.
Animals, like kangaroo rats, store their seeds in different places to assure
themselves of food even if one cache is raided by another animal. Squirrels
sometimes bury their small caches and then forget where. The nuts and seeds are
able to germinate which assures the animals long term food supply.
Two of our non-hoarding clients were engaged in personal
relationships with hoarders. The hoarders had access to the non-hoarders houses
and had started hiding things in small caches. Because these were both
non-hoarding houses, the caches of inappropriate and strange things were
particularly noticeable and very unsettling. With all the research into animal
hoarding and how it relates to human behaviour, it seems possible that some
exploration into scatter hoarding would be valuable.
Psychological factors
The psychological component is effectively what locks the
sufferer down turning their hoard into frozen pain. The clogs and clots of things pile up into protective
shells for their owners. In severe cases, moving single items, not even
throwing them away will elicit cries and panic from the hoarder. It is very
important to recognise this part of hoarding. A non-sufferer will look at a
hoarders house and think: All that is needed here is a good clear out. The
house will then be liveable again. Meals can be cooked. Beds can be slept in.
Windows can be opened. Guests can be invited.
However, the hoarder has stopped living in their home. The
home has become a storage facility with the owner serving the things rather
than the things serving the owner. Sometimes the hoarder will escape to other
places to live. This can take the form of frequent holidays.
The logic of the compulsive hoarder
Because there are times and places where hoarding has saved
lives, compulsive hoarders are provided with reasons and justifications for
their clogged
homes. They will argue that a person entitled to live as they choose. Doctors
and other health professionals will speak about how ‘logical’ a compulsive
hoarder can be. Hoarder logic can be applied to individual small things, micro
behaviors: keeping a plastic bag, one newspaper etc. this is then combined with
an inability to see or be embarrassed by the macro result: 1,000 plastic bags
and huge towers of newspapers.
If the hoarder is embarrassed by the house and they don’t
want people to see how they live, it is an encouraging sign since it means that
the hoarder has accepted that there is something not right. This can be a first
step towards seeking help.
Compulsive hoarding and acquiring
Compulsive hoarding is not just keeping things. It is also
acquiring. Sometimes this can be out of control shopping and buying. Other
times it can be skip diving and scavenging. If embarrassment about the
condition in which they are living is the hoarders first step back to a living
breathing home, stopping the acquiring cycle is the next. Again it is important
to highlight how acquiring is ‘normal’ behavior.
We all need to acquire food and clothing. There are times
when most people will experience the pleasure of a comfort buy: a chocolate
bar, a new pair of shoes, a CD or a magazine. When we are ill, having trouble
at work or mourning a death these small things can get us through a day. For
the hoarder the purchase has two functions the first is that moment of
acquisitive pleasure and the second is to build the shell walls higher, to make
themselves feel safer. Safety, and confidence are crucial in enabling the
hoarder to stop building the walls higher, let alone dismantling them.
Consequences of compulsive hoarding
A hoard can become a major health hazard, fire risk or has
promoted vermin. In these cases government departments move in and radically
clear the site stripping the hoarder of their shell. These are the cases that
become come to the public notice in the news. The hoarder regards this as rape and will
almost certainly re-establish their protecting walls of junk within as little
as three months. Unless the psychological aspects are addressed, a liveable
home cannot be achieved.
Hoarding and collecting
It is also important to differentiate between a hoard and a
collection. A collector is someone who is proud of the collected things and
wants to show them off. They invite guests to admire their collections. A
hoarder is the opposite. They not want anyone in their home. For hoarders,
barring visitors has to do with a fear that the visitor will move or destroy
something. There are cases where trauma can tip a collector over the edge into
becoming a hoarder.
A hidden illness
Hoarders who live alone can go unrecognised for years and
years until their neighbours start to feel the impact. During their working
life, the hoarder will go out to work and entertain in public places. Once they
retire and/or become disabled the situation can become even worse and be
compounded by increasing depression.
Not just the hoarder, but their family
Many times families will give-up. Children who have grown
up in a household clogged
with refuse and paper will leave home and never return. If they see their
parent(s) at all, it will be in their own homes or restaurants. The tragedy is
that often the parents never get to know their grandchildren. There are some
on-line support groups
for children of hoarders.
A gradual process
The process of a cluttered home becoming a hoard storehouse
is a gradual one. Traumas and anger can slow down the normal digestion and
sorting of belongings. It can start as “getting behind”. When someone gets far
enough behind, dealing with it becomes daunting. Words take so much time to
process that getting behind with them can happen very quickly. Many people
hoard words making those clots very common.
Physical fitness and energy are important considerations. Many people are able to ‘just’ stay on top of it until they get old. With less energy the task of addressing the piles can not only seem insuperable, it may be physically impossible.
Physical fitness and energy are important considerations. Many people are able to ‘just’ stay on top of it until they get old. With less energy the task of addressing the piles can not only seem insuperable, it may be physically impossible.
Tackling the hoard
The road back is slow and measured. Throughout, the most
crucial part of tackling a hoard is the person themselves, not how much stuff
there is. In serious cases, the first steps may not seem very important or even
perceptable to the average person but they are to us. To summarise what the
insights might be:
·
I stopped buying things, it was only
making it all worse.
·
I had to make a path for the plumber. When
I let him in, I realised how awful it must look to him.
·
I was away on holiday and I thought how
wonderful it was to be in an empty hotel room
As with anything acknowledging personal ownership of what
is happening is the first step. The next is wanting help and being willing to
accept it.
Clients have to call us themselves.
Family and friends can do the finding, for example by finding this website, but the call needs to come from the client.
Clients have to call us themselves.
Family and friends can do the finding, for example by finding this website, but the call needs to come from the client.
You might also be interested in:
and...
Support for compulsive hoarders
There is very little support available for clutterers and
compulsive hoarders. We've done the research and below is a summary of what
we've found.
·
Self-help support groups
·
On-line support groups
·
Blogs
·
General information on the web
·
Cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT)
·
Professional hands-on help
Hoarding self-help support group in the UK
Currently, there is only ONE self-help support group in the
whole of the UK. Run as part of OCD Action, it is professionally led by Satwant
Singh who is a nurse consultant in CBT and Mental Health and a specialist in
this field. He is donating his time and the meeting is open to those with
obsessive hoarding issues, their families, friends and carers.
We have been along to a meeting as observers and found a
warm welcome along with a constructive and supportive atmosphere.
The group meets from 6 - 8pm on the last Wednesday of the
month in East Ham, East London. More details on the OCD Action website.
Online support groups
For hoarders:
·
Yahoo H-C.
For hoarders with OCD and a strong desire to improve their living spaces. To
remain an active member you must post actions and responses
·
Yahoo Messiness and hoarding. A group of over 2000
members for whom hoarding is a significant problem and who want to change.
·
Yahoo Declutter support. Friendly on-line support for clutterers
Their families and friends:
·
Children of Hoarders. A support group for adult
children of hoarders and their spouses.
·
Yahoo Friends, family of hoarders and clutterers. Small
anonymous group
·
Yahoo Friends of hoarders.
Blogs
·
The Stuff Project - Blog detailing the clearing
of a hoard. A MUST READ!
·
Stella's
story - How Cluttergone have worked with one of their decluttering
clients.
General information on the web
There are a number of websites on the internet that provide
information and support for hoarders and their families.
·
Children of
Hoarders - contains a wealth of information and videos
·
Possessed. This is a short documentary film by
Martin Hampton which is about four people with compulsive hoarding disorder.
·
Hoardhouse - compulsive clutter in New York, by a
team of young journalists
Books to read on compulsive hoarding
We can only find less than half a dozen books written on the
subject of compulsive hoarding. Three of these have been written by the same
authors.
Reading these books make the treatment seem
straightforward. It is not. Read our reviews of books on compulsive hoarding.
The are dozens of books written on the subject of clutter
and disorganisation, most of which originate from the USA. These have lead to
the development of new terms to describe clutterers and hoarders such 'messie'
and increased use of the traditionally term used in the US 'pack rat'.
Many of our Cluttergone clients find these books of little
help as they are aimed at people who just want to 'get organised' and find
'storage solutions' rather than any basic, realistic, practical help.
We've also reviewed the best
books to read on decluttering on the Cluttergone website.
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT)
Few CBT practitioners in the USA have any specialist
training in compulsive hoarding and we are not aware of any specialists in the
UK.
There is a directory of CBT therapists at CBT Register UK,
some of whom treat obsessive compulsive disorders.
TV Programme
Discovery Studios who produce the programme for TLC
'Hoarding:Buried Alive' are looking for participants for their third
documentary series which will feature stories of hoarding from the UK, USA and
other countries. Read on
for more information....
Professional hands-on help
If you are ready to clear your clutter and think that you
would benefit from some hands-on help, do visit our other website www.cluttergone.co.uk.
Our team of professional declutter and organise consultants
cover much of the UK from the West Midlands, through London and the South East
and across to the West Country.
You might also be interested in:
·
Test yourself. Checklists, tests and surveys
·
The Three Cs. Clutter, clots and clogs
Making a decision
If you are reading this site, the probability is that you,
or someone who know has a problem with clutter or hoarding.
Living in clutter is the most miserable existence. A common
phrase we hear is 'I don't want to live like this any more'. But
making that decision takes time and actually putting that decision into action
often takes even longer.
What to do
Don't worry we're not going to suggest that you start
frantically throwing things out. There are lots of other things you can do
first!
*
Read this website. There is a huge range of
information here, much of which is our personal view and is not available
elsewhere on the internet. The site is being continually updated, so do come
back and visit us often!
There may just be something you read that strikes a chord
with you and helps you with that decision. We suggest starting with About compulsive hoarding
and A new view.
* If you have other health problems such as clinical
depression or OCD, be kind to yourself and visit your GP. Generally speaking
doctors are unsure how to treat compulsive hoarding, but depression can be successfully
treated and alleviating that illness may help with your energy levels.
* Take the Wade-Bennett
life-clutter test. Find out what is going on in your life that may
have lead you to clutter or hoard.
* Sometimes naming things helps. If you are ill with an
undiagnosed illness, you worry endlessly about what it may be. When a diagnosis
is made, even of a serious condition, it be comes more manageable because it
has a name. You might find it useful to read our pages on vocabulary and the Three Cs.
* Stop acquiring. For example, don't pick up or buy
newspapers or magazines. This is a major step forward. The less you bring into
your home the easier it will be to sort out what is already there.
* Send for our how-to guides. Cluttergone always has
practical and helpful information available on how to clear your clutter,
including the popular how-to guide 'Where do I start?'. We can also add
you to the list for our quarterly email
newsletter.
* Consider joining a support group for compulsive hoarders, either
on-line or a traditional self-help group meeting.
* Read our blog. Follow the true story of Stella,
one of our clients who is struggling with clutter and disorganisation. We have
been so moved in the time we have known her we felt that others could benefit
from an insight into her life. Our thanks to Stella for letting us share
through a diary what REALLY happens when you declutter and organise with
Cluttergone.
*
Make a start. It doesn't matter what you do.
Just take just 15 minutes to go through your home and throw out anything that
you consider to be rubbish. Try to do this as often as you can. Every day is
good. We understand that may be difficult and it will take time.
* If you are ready to clear your clutter, are
struggling on your own and think that you would benefit from some hands-on help,
do visit our other website www.cluttergone.co.uk. Our team of professional
declutter and organise consultants cover much of the UK from the West Midlands,
through London and the South East and across to the West Country.
* If you can spare a moment, perhaps you would
participate in our on-line survey. It's just one question. At
what age did clutter become a problem for you?
You might also be interested in:
·
Test yourself. Checklists, tests and surveys.
·
The three Cs. Clutter, clots and clogs Different
sorts of clutter.
·
Wade-Bennett life-clutter scale. What's going on
in your life?
·
Vocabulary Defining the language of clutter.
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The three C's - Clutter, Clots and
Clogs
A spectrum of clutter and hoarding
Compulsive hoarding literature and books on decluttering
both use the word 'clutter' to describe the very mildest bit of disorder to the
most extreme hoarding cases. This has become a source of confusion to the lay
reader.
The general use of the word clutter may be that because the
progression and development of the compulsive hoarder has not yet been
identified or tracked by research. In most cases, a hoard has taken 10 or more
years to acquire and settle.
Researchers have been focused on the end result. While
working with clutter clients at one end of the spectrum, hoarders at the other
and the many gradations in between, we have made observations. A normal
household circulates; using all their spaces. Living demands ‘stuff’. Stuff is
taken out and ideally put away. The minimal rooms that people aspire to are
generally photographed between projects.
Clutter
Clutter is easily shifted and is part of a lively,
sometimes disorganized life. Clutter does not describe how much stuff someone
has. Some people are disturbed by small amounts of disorganization or disorder.
Others thrive in the midst of a 'creative mess'. There are no absolutes. What
matters is: Are the things being used? And can the owner get rid of things
easily?
An example where the overall impression may be chaos on its
way to a hoard is a family with four children under 10, both parents working
full or part time and no outside help. Toys, school books, projects, muddle
together with ironing boards, bicycles, office paperwork and breakfast dishes.
Processions are used and while there are frequently scrambles to find things,
they are found, employed and disposed of when they are broken or no longer
needed.
Clots
Clots are when collections of clutter aren't used or moved
for 6 months or more. The household still works. The rooms can still be entered
and lived in but there are 'dead' places. The physical clots are often
accompanied hoarder rationales, and avoidance. Touching clots or moving them
can provoke the same cries and panic that hoarders have when their things are
touched or moved.
The clot we see most is post. Lots of people dread what is
in all those envelopes: bills, final demands, dentist appointments, bank
statements, etc. We have had clients with as many as 3 years of unopened post.
Other examples of clots:
An ever increasing laundry pile
that is never completely folded or put away. Items are added the top layer is
regularly churned by household members looking for things but the foundations
can be untouched for 2 years or more.
Unfinished
clearouts - the bags or boxes that have
happened after a sort out but the rejects have never made it out the door to
the charity shops or the rubbish bins.
Unfinished
projects - collecting fabric for a quilt,
cutting the first bits and then not touching it again for 5 years.
Unwanted
purchases in their original packaging. These
have sat there so long that they can no longer be returned, but the owner
doesn't know what to do with them.
Clogs
Clogs are when clots all over the house have become stuck
to one another. For example a spare room can become a dumping ground. Imagine
all the clots described above have been carried into the spare room and left.
Eventually it is impossible to open the door or get into the room. That is a
clog. When a whole house is clogged it is a completed clog. The things have
become a hoard.
Rather than a living space, the home has become a
storehouse. Part of the description for compulsive hoarder’s houses includes
semi-blocked and blocked doorways. It is very difficult to move through the
spaces. Circulation has stopped. The possessions are no longer being used. The
person is now serving their things rather than the other way around.
Once clots are in place the person is going to be
psychologically much more vulnerable. If clearing clutter lifts depression,
what does the development of clots do? We can work with clots. Serious clogs
are very difficult. If we can get doctors and people to understand clots, if treatment starts
then..... early intervention.
You might also be interested in:
----------------
OTTAWA-
Ottawa Hoarding Cleanup
------------
Step Inside the Real World of
Compulsive Hoarders
Recent research has changed the way clinicians treat
hoarding as well as refuted popular assumptions about people with excessive
clutter
By Ferris Jabr on February 25, 2013
If you had opened the front door of Lee Shuer's apartment
in the early 2000s, you would have encountered a narrow hallway made even
narrower by all kinds of random stuff: unnervingly tall stacks of books and
papers, cardboard boxes full of assorted knickknacks, and two hot pink salon
hair dryer chairs with glass domes suspended from their arched necks. Sidling
down the hallway to the right, you would have reached Shuer's bedroom. The door
would have opened just wide enough for you to squeeze inside, where you would
have seen mounds of stuff three to four feet high on the floor, bed and every
available surface. A typical heap might have contained clothes, a violin case,
a big box of Magic Markers, record albums, a trumpet, a framed picture, a
package of socks, three dictionaries, two thesauruses and a pillow.
Traveling a little farther down the hallway would have
brought you to the common space that Shuer shared with his two roommates—a
space that they had come to call "the museum room." In addition to
Shuer's extensive collection of vintage Atari video games and related
paraphernalia—Pac-Man board games and action figures—the room contained numerous
bobble heads and kitsch from 1970s and '80s; nine milk crates stuffed with
hundreds of eight-track tapes; furniture that he planned to refurbish; pile of
newspapers, magazines and his artwork; and an assemblage of curious salt and
pepper shakers—a mouse and slice of cheese, a dog and fire hydrant.
Like many people, Shuer collected things in his youth—baseball cards, coins, cool rocks—but his childhood collections never became unusually large or disorderly. After college he bounced from place to place with few possessions. But when he settled down in an apartment in Northampton, Mass., in 2000 he began collecting much more avidly than in the past. He spent his weekends and spare time visiting Goodwill, the Salvation Army and tag sales in search of his next acquisition—the more intriguing and unusual, the better. Sometimes he would visit a thrift shop on his lunch break rather than eat.
Like many people, Shuer collected things in his youth—baseball cards, coins, cool rocks—but his childhood collections never became unusually large or disorderly. After college he bounced from place to place with few possessions. But when he settled down in an apartment in Northampton, Mass., in 2000 he began collecting much more avidly than in the past. He spent his weekends and spare time visiting Goodwill, the Salvation Army and tag sales in search of his next acquisition—the more intriguing and unusual, the better. Sometimes he would visit a thrift shop on his lunch break rather than eat.
The objects and bric-a-brac that Shuer collected provided a
sense of comfort, helping him overcome his social anxiety. He was not confident
that he was interesting and likeable—but he knew his collection was. If he
offered a guest a cup of coffee in an eccentric mug, for example, he could
depend on the mug itself to spark a conversation. Soon enough, Shuer had filled
his newfound space with enormous piles of stuff. His roommates were remarkably
patient, given the circumstances, but they repeatedly gave Shuer an ultimatum:
Clear up this mess or we will throw everything out. Shuer would move some items
from the common space into his room and continue collecting. The thought of
discarding even a single item caused him too much pain—a mingling of sadness
and worry that he might need the object one day.
Today, Shuer, 38, lives with his wife Becca in a three-bedroom house in Easthampton that Shuer describes as 85 percent decluttered. When they first moved into the house in 2006 Shuer brought just about everything from his previous apartments with him. His collection completely filled one of the bedrooms on the second story, so that barely an inch of floor space was visible; it spilled out along the stairways, found resting spots on top of the fridge and kitchen cabinets, crowded the living room and claimed half the basement. Now, their living room needs only a little tidying here and there when guests come over. The stairwell leading to the second story is completely free of mess. The kitchen is for kitchen stuff. And Shuer is making good progress on the basement. Through an innovative series of peer-organized workshops designed to help people with excessive clutter—the Buried in Treasures program—Shuer has learned to catch himself in the act of acquiring something he does not have the space for, to challenge his beliefs about the true value of his possessions, and to gradually get rid of things he does not need without mourning their loss.
Most psychiatrists would diagnose Shuer with compulsive hoarding, which is defined as the excessive accumulation of stuff and the refusal to discard it, resulting in problematic clutter. In addition to interfering with daily activities such as cooking and sleeping, extreme clutter often increases health risks from poor sanitation, makes it more difficult to get out of the house in a fire or other emergency and puts the hoarder in danger of eviction. Compulsive hoarders often have other mental illnesses as well: 50 percent have major depressive disorder and 48 percent have either anxiety or social phobia, according to various surveys. In recent years the general public has become more aware of hoarding than ever before, thanks in part to shows such as A&E's Hoarders and TLC's Hoarding: Buried Alive. Many researchers and hoarders—who often prefer to call themselves collectors or clutter bugs—argue, however, that such shows focus on extreme examples and that their sensationalism obscures the reality of day-to-day life for most hoarders. Studies published in the last 10 years have changed the way psychologists and psychiatrists think about compulsive hoarding and contradicted a number of popular assumptions about people with extensive clutter.
In the current edition of psychiatry's standard guidebook—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (DSM-IV)—hoarding is listed as one of the criteria for obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, which is described as an excessive preoccupation with orderliness at the expense of efficiency and flexibility. Many researchers have also thought of hoarding as highly related to, or even a subtype, of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), an anxiety disorder characterized by intrusive, irrational thoughts and ritual behaviors often intended to dispell those thoughts. The DSM-5, to be published this May, recognizes hoarding as a disorder in its own right for the first time. Research in the last decade has confirmed that OCD and hoarding are genetically and neurologically distinct. Recent research also emphasizes that hoarders do not exclusively collect junk and are not lazy, disorganized or unclean people, even if their homes are a mess. Neuroimaging studies and case reports have revealed divergent patterns of brain activity and various cognitive peculiarities common to many hoarders: The very act of deciding what to keep and what to throw away causes them great anxiety, for instance, and they form unusually strong emotional attachments to inanimate objects. Traditional therapies for OCD have largely failed to help compulsive hoarders and complete recovery remains rare, but researchers have developed new promising treatments, including the workshop that helped Shuer so much.
Know your stuff
Serious research about compulsive hoarding began relatively recently. Few rigorous hoarding studies existed before the early 1990s, although Freud and other psychologists described particular cases and theorized about why people hoard. A few widely publicized cases, such as that of the Collyer brothers—two reclusive Americans who were found dead in their New York city apartment surrounded by more than 100 tons of stuff—affirmed a misconception of hoarders as eccentric and socially isolated people. In truth, many hoarders live relatively typical lives, hold steady jobs and maintain ties to friends and family, even if their habits create tension. One recent and surprising finding is that compulsive hoarding is much more prevalent than researchers thought. Between five million and 14 million people in the U.S. are compulsive hoarders—at least twice the number of people diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Some researchers contend that these figures are underestimates and that the vast majority of hoarding remains unrecognized and untreated.
Given that the average age of hoarders in published studies is 50, researchers were also surprised to learn that indications of compulsive hoarding sometimes appear early in life, between ages 11 and 15. The drive to collect is common in childhood. By age six, most children have begun a collection of some kind—coins, stamps, seashells, marbles, action figures—but these collections rarely become so unruly that they interfere with a family's daily activities. Some children, however, reveal a proclivity to hoarding in their emotions: They become furious or miserable when faced with losing a particular object, even one that their families did not realize was important to them. Randy Frost of Smith College in Massachusetts—one of the world's leading experts on compulsive hoarding—recalls one young girl who became nearly inconsolable when she learned that her parents were going to ditch the living room couch. In the vast majority of cases, however, compulsive hoarding does not become problematic until adulthood.
Recent research challenges the notion that hoarders primarily collect and store junk. Hoarders stash a variety of different items, including clothes—old and brand new—bits of glass or pottery, antiques, figurines, magazines, letters, greeting cards, pens, receipts, bills and expired medication. Sometimes hoarders mix incredibly valuable items—such as jewelry or the deed to the house—with piles of genuine junk. Almost anything can become the object of a hoarder's interest and affection. Some collect bits of their own body: fingernails, strands of hair, urine. Others hoard animals. Certain “cat ladies,” such as Irene Vandyke—who, authorities recently discovered, had 67 dead cats in her freezer and more than 100 cats living in crates packed into her home in upstate New York—are likely animal hoarders.
Psychologists no longer regard hoarding as a subset of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Although some symptoms of hoarding and OCD overlap, and the disorders can co-occur, they differ in a number of important ways. First, most hoarders do not perceive thoughts about hoarding as intrusive or unpleasant whereas many people with OCD regard their obsessions as unwelcome interruptions in their usual stream of thoughts. Some hoarders experience no distress at all until a friend or family member intervenes and insists that they get rid of their stuff, although others acknowledge that the clutter is a problem on their own. And, whereas the severity of OCD symptoms fluctuates over time, hoarding tends to get progressively worse. Hoarding and OCD seem to be genetically distinct too. The evidence suggests that hoarding is inherited as a recessive trait, whereas the compulsive checking and organizing common in OCD are dominant.
Researchers have also discovered a number of psychological peculiarities that characterize compulsive hoarding. Everyone endows otherwise ordinary objects with special meaning—the ticket stub from one's first concert, the dependable duffel bag or backpack that has been to several continents. Hoarders tend to see meaning and value in far more items—and a much wider variety of items—than most people. Their emotional investment in those items is much larger than usual, as well.
Some hoarders imbue the inanimate with a kind of sensibility or sentience. Frost and his colleagues describe, for example, a woman who bought half-a-dozen puppets from a TV shopping channel because no one else was bidding on them and she worried that the puppets' feelings would be hurt. Even though she recognized this as an irrational thought, she could not disperse her concern for the puppets. In another case study a young boy stopped eating for a while, fearing that chewing hurt his food. For other hoarders, piles of possessions provide a sense of comfort and security. Some hoarders will keep anything with someone's handwriting or name on it, suggesting that they have a strong tendency to link a person's identity to an object.
The act of deciding which of their belongings to keep and which to throw out makes many hoarders incredibly anxious: they worry that they will make the wrong choice and fear discarding or wasting anything that could prove useful one day. To avoid that anxiety, they often do nothing, allowing stuff to pile up. Hoarders also refuse to throw something out because they anticipate the grief that will follow their loss.
Hoarders tend to organize the world spatially and visually, rather than categorically. Instead of putting a new electricity bill in a designated folder, for example, a hoarder might slip the bill on top of a particular pile of stuff, committing to memory a visual map of its location. In this way, many hoarders can look at their piles of stuff and know exactly what they contain—although the larger and more jumbled the heaps become, the more difficult it is to keep track of individual items. Many compulsive hoarders have difficulty categorizing their possessions—believing that each item is too unique to lump with others—even though they have no trouble classifying objects they do not own.
Research by David Tolin, a clinical psychologist at the Institute of Living in Connecticut, and his colleagues has begun to elucidate some of the neural circuitry underlying compulsive hoarding. In one such study 43 compulsive hoarders, 31 people with OCD and 33 healthy individuals showed up at the lab with their junk mail and newspapers in hand. Inside brain scanners the participants watched a computer screen on which appeared pictures of either their mail and newspapers or paper documents that belonged to someone else. The volunteers had six seconds to make a decision by pressing one of two buttons—keep the item or throw it away. They were under the impression that if they chose the latter the experimenters would shred the paper.
Compared with other participants, hoarders reported more anxiety, sadness and indecisiveness during the experiment. The scanners revealed unique patterns of electrical activity in two particular regions of hoarders' brains: the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and insula. Among many other functions, the ACC and insula are important for monitoring errors, assessing risk and processing fear and other unpleasant emotions. When hoarders made decisions about items that did not belong to them, they had unusually low activity in the ACC and insula. When choosing whether to discard their own possessions, however, they showed unusually high activity in these regions. Tolin and his colleagues interpret these patterns of brain activity as corroborating what hoarders report: When faced with the choice of keeping or discarding a belonging, hoarders experience an inflated sense of risk and excessive fear of making the wrong decision.
New treatments
Because hoarding was considered a subset of OCD, clinicians initially tried the same treatments for both disorders. These attempts mostly failed. Certain antidepressants, in particular selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), often help people with OCD but have limited success in treating compulsive hoarding. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which involves recognizing and changing maladaptive thoughts, emotions and behaviors, works well for a range of mood and anxiety disorders. The variety of CBT typically used for OCD helps only 30 to 40 percent of compulsive hoarders, however.
In the mid 1990s, Frost and Gail Steketee of Boston University—another leading expert on hoarding—began developing a form of CBT tailored for compulsive hoarding, eventually publishing a treatment manual for therapists in 2007. Steketee and Frost recommend, for example, asking patients to write a list of pragmatic questions that they might ask themselves when deciding whether to buy something—Can I afford this? Do I have the space for this object? Do I really need it?—and to keep the list with them. Whenever they get the urge to buy or otherwise acquire something, patients are supposed to bring out the list and answer the questions in order to make smarter decisions.
Today, Shuer, 38, lives with his wife Becca in a three-bedroom house in Easthampton that Shuer describes as 85 percent decluttered. When they first moved into the house in 2006 Shuer brought just about everything from his previous apartments with him. His collection completely filled one of the bedrooms on the second story, so that barely an inch of floor space was visible; it spilled out along the stairways, found resting spots on top of the fridge and kitchen cabinets, crowded the living room and claimed half the basement. Now, their living room needs only a little tidying here and there when guests come over. The stairwell leading to the second story is completely free of mess. The kitchen is for kitchen stuff. And Shuer is making good progress on the basement. Through an innovative series of peer-organized workshops designed to help people with excessive clutter—the Buried in Treasures program—Shuer has learned to catch himself in the act of acquiring something he does not have the space for, to challenge his beliefs about the true value of his possessions, and to gradually get rid of things he does not need without mourning their loss.
Most psychiatrists would diagnose Shuer with compulsive hoarding, which is defined as the excessive accumulation of stuff and the refusal to discard it, resulting in problematic clutter. In addition to interfering with daily activities such as cooking and sleeping, extreme clutter often increases health risks from poor sanitation, makes it more difficult to get out of the house in a fire or other emergency and puts the hoarder in danger of eviction. Compulsive hoarders often have other mental illnesses as well: 50 percent have major depressive disorder and 48 percent have either anxiety or social phobia, according to various surveys. In recent years the general public has become more aware of hoarding than ever before, thanks in part to shows such as A&E's Hoarders and TLC's Hoarding: Buried Alive. Many researchers and hoarders—who often prefer to call themselves collectors or clutter bugs—argue, however, that such shows focus on extreme examples and that their sensationalism obscures the reality of day-to-day life for most hoarders. Studies published in the last 10 years have changed the way psychologists and psychiatrists think about compulsive hoarding and contradicted a number of popular assumptions about people with extensive clutter.
In the current edition of psychiatry's standard guidebook—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (DSM-IV)—hoarding is listed as one of the criteria for obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, which is described as an excessive preoccupation with orderliness at the expense of efficiency and flexibility. Many researchers have also thought of hoarding as highly related to, or even a subtype, of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), an anxiety disorder characterized by intrusive, irrational thoughts and ritual behaviors often intended to dispell those thoughts. The DSM-5, to be published this May, recognizes hoarding as a disorder in its own right for the first time. Research in the last decade has confirmed that OCD and hoarding are genetically and neurologically distinct. Recent research also emphasizes that hoarders do not exclusively collect junk and are not lazy, disorganized or unclean people, even if their homes are a mess. Neuroimaging studies and case reports have revealed divergent patterns of brain activity and various cognitive peculiarities common to many hoarders: The very act of deciding what to keep and what to throw away causes them great anxiety, for instance, and they form unusually strong emotional attachments to inanimate objects. Traditional therapies for OCD have largely failed to help compulsive hoarders and complete recovery remains rare, but researchers have developed new promising treatments, including the workshop that helped Shuer so much.
Know your stuff
Serious research about compulsive hoarding began relatively recently. Few rigorous hoarding studies existed before the early 1990s, although Freud and other psychologists described particular cases and theorized about why people hoard. A few widely publicized cases, such as that of the Collyer brothers—two reclusive Americans who were found dead in their New York city apartment surrounded by more than 100 tons of stuff—affirmed a misconception of hoarders as eccentric and socially isolated people. In truth, many hoarders live relatively typical lives, hold steady jobs and maintain ties to friends and family, even if their habits create tension. One recent and surprising finding is that compulsive hoarding is much more prevalent than researchers thought. Between five million and 14 million people in the U.S. are compulsive hoarders—at least twice the number of people diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Some researchers contend that these figures are underestimates and that the vast majority of hoarding remains unrecognized and untreated.
Given that the average age of hoarders in published studies is 50, researchers were also surprised to learn that indications of compulsive hoarding sometimes appear early in life, between ages 11 and 15. The drive to collect is common in childhood. By age six, most children have begun a collection of some kind—coins, stamps, seashells, marbles, action figures—but these collections rarely become so unruly that they interfere with a family's daily activities. Some children, however, reveal a proclivity to hoarding in their emotions: They become furious or miserable when faced with losing a particular object, even one that their families did not realize was important to them. Randy Frost of Smith College in Massachusetts—one of the world's leading experts on compulsive hoarding—recalls one young girl who became nearly inconsolable when she learned that her parents were going to ditch the living room couch. In the vast majority of cases, however, compulsive hoarding does not become problematic until adulthood.
Recent research challenges the notion that hoarders primarily collect and store junk. Hoarders stash a variety of different items, including clothes—old and brand new—bits of glass or pottery, antiques, figurines, magazines, letters, greeting cards, pens, receipts, bills and expired medication. Sometimes hoarders mix incredibly valuable items—such as jewelry or the deed to the house—with piles of genuine junk. Almost anything can become the object of a hoarder's interest and affection. Some collect bits of their own body: fingernails, strands of hair, urine. Others hoard animals. Certain “cat ladies,” such as Irene Vandyke—who, authorities recently discovered, had 67 dead cats in her freezer and more than 100 cats living in crates packed into her home in upstate New York—are likely animal hoarders.
Psychologists no longer regard hoarding as a subset of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Although some symptoms of hoarding and OCD overlap, and the disorders can co-occur, they differ in a number of important ways. First, most hoarders do not perceive thoughts about hoarding as intrusive or unpleasant whereas many people with OCD regard their obsessions as unwelcome interruptions in their usual stream of thoughts. Some hoarders experience no distress at all until a friend or family member intervenes and insists that they get rid of their stuff, although others acknowledge that the clutter is a problem on their own. And, whereas the severity of OCD symptoms fluctuates over time, hoarding tends to get progressively worse. Hoarding and OCD seem to be genetically distinct too. The evidence suggests that hoarding is inherited as a recessive trait, whereas the compulsive checking and organizing common in OCD are dominant.
Researchers have also discovered a number of psychological peculiarities that characterize compulsive hoarding. Everyone endows otherwise ordinary objects with special meaning—the ticket stub from one's first concert, the dependable duffel bag or backpack that has been to several continents. Hoarders tend to see meaning and value in far more items—and a much wider variety of items—than most people. Their emotional investment in those items is much larger than usual, as well.
Some hoarders imbue the inanimate with a kind of sensibility or sentience. Frost and his colleagues describe, for example, a woman who bought half-a-dozen puppets from a TV shopping channel because no one else was bidding on them and she worried that the puppets' feelings would be hurt. Even though she recognized this as an irrational thought, she could not disperse her concern for the puppets. In another case study a young boy stopped eating for a while, fearing that chewing hurt his food. For other hoarders, piles of possessions provide a sense of comfort and security. Some hoarders will keep anything with someone's handwriting or name on it, suggesting that they have a strong tendency to link a person's identity to an object.
The act of deciding which of their belongings to keep and which to throw out makes many hoarders incredibly anxious: they worry that they will make the wrong choice and fear discarding or wasting anything that could prove useful one day. To avoid that anxiety, they often do nothing, allowing stuff to pile up. Hoarders also refuse to throw something out because they anticipate the grief that will follow their loss.
Hoarders tend to organize the world spatially and visually, rather than categorically. Instead of putting a new electricity bill in a designated folder, for example, a hoarder might slip the bill on top of a particular pile of stuff, committing to memory a visual map of its location. In this way, many hoarders can look at their piles of stuff and know exactly what they contain—although the larger and more jumbled the heaps become, the more difficult it is to keep track of individual items. Many compulsive hoarders have difficulty categorizing their possessions—believing that each item is too unique to lump with others—even though they have no trouble classifying objects they do not own.
Research by David Tolin, a clinical psychologist at the Institute of Living in Connecticut, and his colleagues has begun to elucidate some of the neural circuitry underlying compulsive hoarding. In one such study 43 compulsive hoarders, 31 people with OCD and 33 healthy individuals showed up at the lab with their junk mail and newspapers in hand. Inside brain scanners the participants watched a computer screen on which appeared pictures of either their mail and newspapers or paper documents that belonged to someone else. The volunteers had six seconds to make a decision by pressing one of two buttons—keep the item or throw it away. They were under the impression that if they chose the latter the experimenters would shred the paper.
Compared with other participants, hoarders reported more anxiety, sadness and indecisiveness during the experiment. The scanners revealed unique patterns of electrical activity in two particular regions of hoarders' brains: the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and insula. Among many other functions, the ACC and insula are important for monitoring errors, assessing risk and processing fear and other unpleasant emotions. When hoarders made decisions about items that did not belong to them, they had unusually low activity in the ACC and insula. When choosing whether to discard their own possessions, however, they showed unusually high activity in these regions. Tolin and his colleagues interpret these patterns of brain activity as corroborating what hoarders report: When faced with the choice of keeping or discarding a belonging, hoarders experience an inflated sense of risk and excessive fear of making the wrong decision.
New treatments
Because hoarding was considered a subset of OCD, clinicians initially tried the same treatments for both disorders. These attempts mostly failed. Certain antidepressants, in particular selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), often help people with OCD but have limited success in treating compulsive hoarding. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which involves recognizing and changing maladaptive thoughts, emotions and behaviors, works well for a range of mood and anxiety disorders. The variety of CBT typically used for OCD helps only 30 to 40 percent of compulsive hoarders, however.
In the mid 1990s, Frost and Gail Steketee of Boston University—another leading expert on hoarding—began developing a form of CBT tailored for compulsive hoarding, eventually publishing a treatment manual for therapists in 2007. Steketee and Frost recommend, for example, asking patients to write a list of pragmatic questions that they might ask themselves when deciding whether to buy something—Can I afford this? Do I have the space for this object? Do I really need it?—and to keep the list with them. Whenever they get the urge to buy or otherwise acquire something, patients are supposed to bring out the list and answer the questions in order to make smarter decisions.
Tolerance-building exercises gradually teach patients to
resist the urge to acquire. At first, patients simply drive by a store they
would like to visit without stopping to go inside. Then they learn to walk
right past the store. In the final stage they enter the store, pick up an item
that they really want to buy, put it down and leave. Similar exercises teach
hoarders to discard items they already have and do not need. Helping hoarders
declutter their homes bit by bit is far more effective than hiring a cleaning
service to remove everything in one shot: the sudden and dramatic loss can
enrage hoarders or plunge them into depression; some go into hoarding
hyperdrive to replace what was taken from them.
In one test of hoarding-specific CBT, 18 volunteer hoarders immediately began a course of treatment, completing 26 one-hour-long sessions over several months; another 19 volunteers had to wait 12 weeks before beginning the same treatment program. In those first 12 weeks volunteers receiving hoarding-specific CBT improved far more than wait-list participants on measures of clutter and difficulty discarding items, indicating that the treatment was working and that improvements were not just an effect of time. At the conclusion of the study, after all 37 participants had completed their treatment, 26 (70 percent) had improved in some way and therapists concluded that nine patients (24 percent) were "very much improved."
Some of Tolin's neuroimaging studies suggest that hoarding-specific CBT changes the brain activity of compulsive hoarders. In one small study six compulsive hoarders completed 16 weekly 90-minute CBT sessions. Before treatment, activity in the cingulate cortex and insula was unusually high when hoarders had to make choices about their possessions, as observed in earlier studies. When their treatment was complete, the activity in these regions was much lower, sometimes approaching levels seen in healthy participants, although their habits had not changed much. Tolin thinks that even if therapy changes brain activity relatively quickly, significant changes in behavior require more time.
To increase awareness about hoarding-specific CBT, Steketee, Frost and Tolin and co-authored a book entitled Buried in Treasures. The book has become the basis for peer-organized support groups for people with problematic clutter—especially for those who cannot afford one-on-one therapy. In typical Buried in Treasures workshops, which are free, between eight and 12 participants complete many of the same exercises and homework assignments central to hoarding-specific CBT over a period of 20 weeks, guided by a peer "facilitator." In various trials of the Buried in Treasures workshops, symptoms of hoarding declined by between 22 and 27 percent and, in one study, an inspector judged more than 70 percent of participants as "much" or "very much" improved after visiting their homes. Buried in Treasures workshops, which originated in Massachusetts, are now active in San Francisco and Miami and will soon begin in New York City.
In 2007, not long after moving into his Easthamptom home, Shuer met Frost through colleagues and volunteered to run a series of Buried in Treasures workshops. In the process, Shuer began to change his self-image and his habits. "Over time my self-esteem and identity shifted," he says. "I learned that I didn't need those props anymore to have a social life. I don't feel a sense of loss or pain anymore when I give something up." He is now the director of Mutual Support Services, a component of the mental health and social services organization ServiceNet, and he continues to sort through his colossal collection, getting rid of what he does not really need and cannot accommodate in his home. A recent photograph that he provided depicts a charming and neat living room: no boxes of knickknacks or piles of magazines and concert flyers; nothing draped on the beige couches; one stray pillow and some cat toys on the carpet; and a single bookshelf with framed pictures, vases and figurines carefully arranged.
"I have learned to limit myself," Shuer says. "I'm not saying that I can never get anything again. If I find a cool book, I now know that I have to make space for it on the bookshelf. I have more free time and a much happier partner who really appreciates it. She loves me but she definitely did not love living with all that stuff."
In one test of hoarding-specific CBT, 18 volunteer hoarders immediately began a course of treatment, completing 26 one-hour-long sessions over several months; another 19 volunteers had to wait 12 weeks before beginning the same treatment program. In those first 12 weeks volunteers receiving hoarding-specific CBT improved far more than wait-list participants on measures of clutter and difficulty discarding items, indicating that the treatment was working and that improvements were not just an effect of time. At the conclusion of the study, after all 37 participants had completed their treatment, 26 (70 percent) had improved in some way and therapists concluded that nine patients (24 percent) were "very much improved."
Some of Tolin's neuroimaging studies suggest that hoarding-specific CBT changes the brain activity of compulsive hoarders. In one small study six compulsive hoarders completed 16 weekly 90-minute CBT sessions. Before treatment, activity in the cingulate cortex and insula was unusually high when hoarders had to make choices about their possessions, as observed in earlier studies. When their treatment was complete, the activity in these regions was much lower, sometimes approaching levels seen in healthy participants, although their habits had not changed much. Tolin thinks that even if therapy changes brain activity relatively quickly, significant changes in behavior require more time.
To increase awareness about hoarding-specific CBT, Steketee, Frost and Tolin and co-authored a book entitled Buried in Treasures. The book has become the basis for peer-organized support groups for people with problematic clutter—especially for those who cannot afford one-on-one therapy. In typical Buried in Treasures workshops, which are free, between eight and 12 participants complete many of the same exercises and homework assignments central to hoarding-specific CBT over a period of 20 weeks, guided by a peer "facilitator." In various trials of the Buried in Treasures workshops, symptoms of hoarding declined by between 22 and 27 percent and, in one study, an inspector judged more than 70 percent of participants as "much" or "very much" improved after visiting their homes. Buried in Treasures workshops, which originated in Massachusetts, are now active in San Francisco and Miami and will soon begin in New York City.
In 2007, not long after moving into his Easthamptom home, Shuer met Frost through colleagues and volunteered to run a series of Buried in Treasures workshops. In the process, Shuer began to change his self-image and his habits. "Over time my self-esteem and identity shifted," he says. "I learned that I didn't need those props anymore to have a social life. I don't feel a sense of loss or pain anymore when I give something up." He is now the director of Mutual Support Services, a component of the mental health and social services organization ServiceNet, and he continues to sort through his colossal collection, getting rid of what he does not really need and cannot accommodate in his home. A recent photograph that he provided depicts a charming and neat living room: no boxes of knickknacks or piles of magazines and concert flyers; nothing draped on the beige couches; one stray pillow and some cat toys on the carpet; and a single bookshelf with framed pictures, vases and figurines carefully arranged.
"I have learned to limit myself," Shuer says. "I'm not saying that I can never get anything again. If I find a cool book, I now know that I have to make space for it on the bookshelf. I have more free time and a much happier partner who really appreciates it. She loves me but she definitely did not love living with all that stuff."
Editor's Note: The text was amended to clarify that the DSM-IV
lists hoarding as a symptom of obsessive compulsive personality disorder rather
than obsessive compulsive disorder, although many psychiatrists and researchers
once regarded all three as highly similar. As explained in the article,
psychiatrists now recognize hoarding as a disorder in its own right.
------------------
CANADA- Toronto
Standard
The Hoarders
After the tragic Wellesley East fire of last September, the
number of hoarder evictions is well up. How time is running out for Toronto's
people of clutter.
By Howard Akler
September 19th, 2011 http://www.torontostandard.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Hoarder35-image1.jpgShe
hands me a Mason jar of brownish, liquefying things. Only by their warts are
they recognizable for what they once were: pickles. Next comes a jar of beets
gone crusty black, and another the contents of which gave up the ghost long
ago. Now the cans. New England clam chowder, with a best before date of April,
2007. Others less recent. “Garbage, right?” I ask. Again, Angie Ferri goes over
the ground rules. Expired edibles are, without question, garbage. Anything else
gets tossed only with permission from Paul. So when I sift through the six
cardboard boxes and three recycling bins that fill his tiny kitchen, every
excavation – Wetnaps, yellowed Herman cartoons, back issues of Toronto
Life, unopened junk mail, unopened personal mail, paper napkins, photo
mags, unused envelopes of all sizes – receives a cryptologist’s scrutiny, a
cleric’s devotion. Photo of the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. “That’s an
amazing shot,” says Paul. Niagara winery brochures. “I’ll sort those later.”
From the kitchen, Ferri shoots me a knowing look. Hoarders famously delay
divestment. The physical removal of items is nothing compared to the painful
process of decision: what to keep and what to throw out. Herself a recovering
hoarder, Ferri’s been clean, literally, for ten years. In 2008, she and friend
Jim Altibello started Earthsafe Canada, an extreme cleaning outfit originally
focused on the city’s bedbug problem. Their first hoarding case was in 2009;
they had five the following year, and seven so far in 2011. Their rates are
flexible, dependent not only on the size of the job, but the depth. She’ll
charge Paul $2,000 to help him work through multiple layers of disarray. Paul
stands just outside the kitchen. Stooped, bespectacled, the 77-year-old Canada
Post retiree still wears the colours. In the closet behind him, I count six
official coats. But I don’t stare for long because that’s another rule: No
snooping in closets, cupboards, drawers. Paul copes pretty well with the first
round of cleaning. His smile is wide and, once he gets comfortable with his
visitors, frequent. “Hey,” he says, pulling a sheaf of dirty jokes from the
morass of paper on his desk. “Why are men like tiles?” In the kitchen, we
finally hit bare floor. “Because if you lay them properly the first time, you
can walk all over them forever.” For thirty years, Paul’s lived in this midtown
apartment, steadily accumulating. Five hundred and fifty musty and stuffed
square feet. Living room dust, long undisturbed, lays upon Mahler records,
mystery novels, small stone sculptures. A 105-pound Bernese Mountain Dog named
Pawlin wanders out of the bedroom and into an avalanche of paper. Paul sits
down. I hand him a can of Volkswagen Heavy Duty Brake Fluid. He hefts it. “I
haven’t driven a Volkswagen in 35 years.” Pawlin, rheumy-eyed and
mild-mannered, stretches out by the bedroom door. This could take a while. The Centre
for Equality Rights in Accommodation, a tiny non-profit operation
just north of Kensington Market, receives nearly one hundred eviction calls
each month. The majority of these are for rental arrears, down-on-their-luck
tenants who need advice and referrals to help pay what they owe and keep their
homes. Lately though, we’ve seen an uptick in hoarding cases. In my first four
years on the eviction prevention desk, I helped one hoarder. I’m working on
five this month alone. The numbers are up because of what went down last
September. Tenant Stephen Vassilev lived among highly-combustible clutter, a
mess of law books and legal documents that caught fire in his 24th-floor
apartment, blazed through the public housing slab at 200 Wellesley Street East,
and set off alarm bells that ring still to this day: 1,200 evacuees, untold
millions in building repair and tenant compensation packages, plus the
likelihood of another $80 million more because of a class action lawsuit
brought against Toronto Community Housing Corporation and their property
management partner, Greenwin. All over the city, landlords have become more
adamant about apartment inspections. Visits from Toronto Fire Service and
Toronto Public Health are more frequent. Anyone deemed to possess “excessive
belongings” gets slapped with an N5, notice that they are accused of “willful
or negligent damage” to the property and have interfered with the “reasonable
enjoyment” of others. Clean-up is ordered to begin within two to three weeks;
if not, the tenant faces a possible eviction hearing at the presiding body, the
Landlord Tenant Board. While it’s true that most property managers have enough
understanding to be soft on these deadlines, it’s equally true that the second
a tenant holds an N5, they can hear the clock ticking. “Something set these
people off, some kind of traumatic event,” says Andrea Perry, an occupational
therapist in community mental health. Hoarders retreat from the world, hiding
themselves behind a phalanx of possessions. Every item has deep emotional
significance. “We need to be very patient with them. We can’t bulldoze our way
through.” Hoarding, long considered akin to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, is
strangely resistant to typical OCD treatments. “The success rate for cognitive
therapy and anti-anxiety medication is really minimal. It’s a hugely perplexing
problem and we just don’t have enough knowledge.” Here’s what we do know:
hoarders tend to be private, isolated people. They rarely seek help, either
because they don’t recognize their problem or cannot face it. Estimates that 5
per cent of the population is affected are likely low; and since the majority
of them are seniors, we’ll continue to see a spike in the numbers as the
population turns grey. In Regent Park, where outdated public housing awaits the
boom of demolition, I stand among smaller, odder architecture. A shadeless lamp
teeters on a leather suitcase which balances on a limp carton that sits in a laundry
basket. Leaning towers all around, slumping pyramids of stuff. Maria shows me
rotary phones, Barbie dolls, teapots. Her two-floor, three-bedroom apartment is
packed. “I used to run to the dollar store and buy things whenever my
life got too stressful,” says the 62-year old Guatemalan native. She’s had
plenty of stress. One daughter deceased, another crippled by cancer, and a son
currently in jail. Despite such trauma, Maria maintains a sly humour. While
carefully unpacking the artifacts of her life – the complete Knight Rider
series, on VHS, unwatched – she looks at me with warm, crinkly eyes. “Maybe
insane.” Angie Ferri laughs. She’s three weeks into what will becomea
four-month job. Toronto Public Health is picking up the $3,400 tab for this
job, but the women are doing all the heavy lifting. Furniture is slowly
unburied, open spaces are visible on the floor. What’s more, Maria has
developed a good grasp on her problem. She now takes long walks to help curb
her compulsive spending and is forthright about her 30-year affliction.
“Getting them to open up is a huge step,” says Ferri. “What you see in our
homes is really what’s in our heads. We’re a mess. Is it any wonder we don’t
like to let anyone in?” Pop culture, of all things, is helping to open doors.
The story of the Collyer brothers, hermitic Manhattanites who lived and died
amid an astonishing array of detritus, has already been the basis for a movie
by Diane Keaton and a novel by E.L. Doctorow. The wild popularity of reality
shows on A&E and TLC has further increased awareness. Even the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is getting into the act;
according to a recent article in the National Post, a section on this
compulsive problem might make the next edition. Hoarding has never been hotter.
So what should this cultural currency buy? Time. Time not just for wider
general acceptance nor for greater understanding by experts, but time for the
hoarders themselves. Under the threat of eviction, they have no choice but to
face disorder. We’re a mess. This is the sad, courageous truth: these
are people forced to tidy up their inner and outer worlds, to learn how to hold
on to some parts of their troubled biographies and how to let go of others.
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Hoarders often endure a lifelong struggle with hoarding. ...
First, by practicing the removal of clutter with the help of a clinician or
coach and
----------------
THE
NEW YORKER
Let It Go
Are we becoming a nation of hoarders?
http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/141215_r25898-785.jpgLittle
Edie Beale in Grey Gardens, the home she shared with her mother, in 1972.Credit
Photograph by Tom Wargacki / WireImage My mother survived to the age of
ninety-three, so she had time to develop a number of habits that people now
consider to be symptomatic of dementia. Hoarding, for example. She lived in
Santa Barbara, in an apartment with a perfectly adequate kitchen, but in order
to store her dishes she had to buy a freestanding cabinet and install it in the
dining room. She needed her kitchen cupboards for other purposes, such as her
collection of polystyrene food containers. In her late years, my mother
underwent several operations, and, for a long time, after she came home, Meals
on Wheels delivered her dinner. Secretly, she wanted no part of the food. What
she did like, however, was the receptacles the dinners came in. These boxes,
with the flip-up lids, are common trash items of our time. But to my mother
they were exotic, and attractive: gleaming and white, with little compartments,
like a jewelry box. She told me that she might use one as a desk organizer, or
perhaps a sewing kit, with different kinds of buttons in the wells. I don’t
know what she did with the dinners, but the containers were washed, patted dry,
and carefully stacked on their designated shelves.
Then, every year, shortly before Thanksgiving, I would fly
in from New York to visit her, and the first thing we did on the morning after
my arrival was clean out the polystyrene-container cupboard. I would get up on
a stepladder, with a trash bag, and dump the containers in, one by one. She
would stand below me, in her blue robe, her eyes sparkling with—what? Grief?
Anger? Eagerness to fill the newly vacated space? I told myself that I was
doing her a favor, and I was. I was helping to keep her apartment in the kind
of shape where no one could come in and say that she had to be moved to a
nursing home—a possibility that she actively feared. Still, the clear-outs were
hard for her. Soon, she knew, she was going to lose everything she had, because
she was going to lose her life. Until that happened, she was making sure that she
had plenty of things. And here I came, year after year, throwing them away.
She died in 2010, and so she never had to find out that in
2013 the American Psychiatric Association declared her storage habits a
diagnostic feature of a mental illness called “hoarding disorder,” or H.D. As
defined by the A.P.A., H.D. is a persistent difficulty in discarding
possessions, regardless of their actual value, to the point where the person’s
accumulated goods congest living areas and impede their intended use. Hoarders
also tend to go in for energetic collecting, often at inexpensive
emporia—thrift shops, yard sales, and the like. The items most commonly
hoarded, the A.P.A. says, are newspapers, magazines, old clothes, bags, books,
mail, and paperwork, though valuable materials—indeed, cash and checks—may also
be included with the junk.
The document in which these guidelines are laid out is the
fifth edition of the A.P.A.’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (2013), or DSM-V. The first
edition was published in 1952; since then, it has undergone five substantial
revisions, and, in the process, the concept of psychopathology has broadened.
For a number of years now, you haven’t had to do anything especially
eye-catching to make it into the manual. DSM-V has a new category,
“excoriation (skin-picking) disorder,” which is where you could end up if you
don’t stop picking your cuticles. In a section called “Conditions for Further
Study,” the manual lists behaviors that it isn’t calling disorders yet but is asking
us to think about. Consider one: “persistent complex bereavement disorder.”
That’s when you can’t get over the death of someone close to you within the
period of time that the DSM considers to be appropriate: a year if
you’re an adult, six months if you’re a child. If you fail, the manual
suggests, you may be the victim not only of grief but also of illness, which
calls for treatment.
Just as bereavement has an ordinary cause (death), so
hoarding may be the product of unremarkable circumstances—notably modern
medicine, which allows us to live longer. DSM-V says that hoarding
sometimes begins in childhood, but that by the time the hoarders come to the
attention of the authorities they tend to be old. This makes sense. The aged
have fewer pleasures than younger people do, and therefore may be more tempted
by the prospect of having plastic flyswatters in five different colors. Also,
old people are likely to be living alone, without someone to tell them that
they are doing something unusual, or to make them care about that fact.
Finally, there is the economic factor. If our grandmothers and our
great-grandmothers keep bags of string, that may be because they may remember a
time when they had no string.
Normal as all this sounds, there are cases of hoarding that
don’t fall within the boundaries of the normal, and these are the subject of
“The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture” (University of
Chicago), by Scott Herring, a professor of English at Indiana University.
Probably the most famous American case—Herring leads with it—is that of Homer
and Langley Collyer, two brothers who lived in an imposing four-story
brownstone at Fifth Avenue and 128th Street, in Manhattan, in the first half of
the twentieth century. The Collyers were the sons of a distinguished family.
Their great-grandfather built one of the largest shipyards on the East River.
Their father was a respected obstetrician. Both boys went to Columbia
University, Homer receiving a degree in law, Langley in engineering. But the
family had a long vein of eccentricity. The father, on days when his work
called him to City Hospital, on Roosevelt Island, is said to have paddled there
in his canoe and, at night, paddled back to Manhattan and carried the canoe
home.
The brothers worked for a while, but gradually they
stopped, and allowed their phone, gas, electricity, and water services to
lapse. In time, they began ignoring their tax and mortgage bills as well. Homer
eventually went blind, and developed a near-paralytic rheumatism. After that,
he did not leave the house. Langley took care of him. He, too, then rarely went
out except late at night, usually to find food. But what most surprised the
neighbors was the amount of debris that the Collyers seemed to be accumulating.
Rumors circulated that the men were rich, and had stashed a lot of money in the
house. Hence there were numerous break-ins. The would-be burglars apparently
found no cash but, instead, fabulous mounds of junk.
In 1947, a caller alerted the police that someone in the
Collyer mansion may have died. After a day’s search, the police found the body
of Homer, sitting bent over, with his head on his knees. But where was Langley?
It took workers eighteen days to find him. The house contained what, in the
end, was said to have been more than a hundred and seventy tons of debris.
There were toys, bicycles, guns, chandeliers, tapestries, thousands of books,
fourteen grand pianos, an organ, the chassis of a Model T Ford, and Dr.
Collyer’s canoe. There were also passbooks for bank accounts containing more
than thirty thousand dollars, in today’s money.
As Herring describes it, the rooms were packed almost to
the ceilings, but the mass, like a Swiss cheese, was pierced by tunnels, which
Langley had equipped with booby traps to foil burglars. It was in one of those
tunnels that his corpse, partly eaten by rats, was finally discovered, only a
few feet away from where Homer’s body had been found. He was apparently
bringing Homer some food when he accidentally set off one of his traps and entombed
himself. The medical examiner estimated that Langley had been dead for about a
month. Homer seems to have died of starvation, waiting for his dinner.
A more cheerful story, retold by Herring, is that of Edith
Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Edith—Big Edie and Little Edie, as they
are known. These two women would probably have lived and died without eliciting
much comment had Big Edie not been the aunt of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy
Onassis. Big Edie was a party girl; Little Edie was her true heir—beautiful,
undisciplined, and fun. Big Edie’s husband, a Wall Street lawyer, left her when
she was in her thirties. Little Edie never married. By 1952, the two women were
left on their own, living on small allowances, in the family’s mansion, Grey
Gardens, in East Hampton. Conditions in the house went downhill year by year.
The paint peeled; feral cats colonized the property; Little Edie fed them. The
roof developed holes; raccoons fell through; Little Edie fed them. Herring
includes a wonderful photograph of her smiling broadly as she stands in front
of a waist-high pile of empty cans, presumably cat-food cans, in the dining
room. But, apparently, that was O.K., because the women didn’t eat in the
dining room. They inhabited only three of the house’s twenty-eight rooms, and
whatever they had for dinner seems to have been cooked over a can of Sterno, on
Big Edie’s nightstand.
As Grey Gardens became increasingly run-down—in time, it
looked like something out of a gothic novel—the neighbors contacted the authorities.
In 1971, when Big and Little Edie were seventy-six and fifty-three,
respectively, they received a visit from the county health department and were
told that, unless the house was cleaned up, they would be evicted. This was an
even bigger press sensation than that of the Collyers, and the reason, of
course, was Jacqueline Onassis. The news that she had close relatives who were
living in filth was an occasion of scandal and Schadenfreude. Onassis offered
to pay for a cleanup of the property. The cans were removed, together with many
things that the Beales were likely very sorry to lose, and the women were
allowed to stay in their home.
A story as good as this did not end there. In time, the
Beales were introduced to the brothers Albert and David Maysles, the
documentary filmmakers, who clearly fell half in love with them. Working in
collaboration with Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer, the brothers made the Beales
the subject of the documentary “Grey Gardens” (1975), which became a cult
favorite. Its primary appeal is probably the combination of squalor and
glamour. After the departure of the health department, the Beales soon managed
to make their house comfortable again. In some marvellous footage that the
Maysles brothers included in a second film, released in 2006, a raccoon that
had apparently entered the house through a hole in the wall helps himself to a
slice of white bread and strolls off with his dinner.
“Can I ask you a personal question?
What does all this have to do with hoarding?
True, the ladies
didn’t throw away those cat-food cans, but it’s hard to say what the real drama
is here, because the evidence is a piece of art, a movie, which, even if it
wasn’t scripted, was nevertheless controlled by what the Beales soon realized
were the filmmakers’ expectations. Those included not just clutter but also
upper-class insouciance and some rather complicated family psychology, of the
Tennessee Williams sort. The Edies bicker constantly, but they obviously love
each other. They sit in bed and eat ice cream together. These notes of
sweetness are part of what allowed the Beales’ story to become as popular as it
did. Another attraction was the heavy layer of camp supplied by Little Edie,
who had a remarkable way with clothes (she liked to wear her skirts upside
down) and a highly theatrical accent. Finally, there was politics. Of the
cleanup forced on her and her mother by the health department, Little Edie said
to the Maysles brothers, “They do it to everybody. They want everybody to be
the same. You can’t have anything different.” Such sentiments were very much of
the period.
But I believe that the crucial element in the Beales’ story
was money. If they crammed twenty-eight rooms with junk, that’s in part because
they had a house with twenty-eight rooms. And if they declined to do the
dishes, wouldn’t you, on many nights, have preferred to omit that task?
The sense that hoarding was a symptom of genteel
eccentricity started to change about twenty years ago. In 1993, Randy Frost, a
professor of psychology at Smith College, and one of his students, Rachel
Gross, published an article, in Behaviour Research and Therapy, to the
effect that hoarding was not rare but common, and a dangerous business. By
2010, Frost and a colleague, Gail Steketee, in their book “Stuff: Compulsive
Hoarding and the Meaning of Things”—which examined the Collyers in detail—were
claiming that between six and fifteen million Americans were engaged in
pathological hoarding. (At the top end, that’s more than the population of
Illinois.) If so, why hadn’t we noticed before? Partly, some writers said,
because hoarding is carried on in secret. (Hoarders don’t usually invite people
over.) More important was the way the condition had been categorized. Early
psychological writings treated hoarding merely as an aspect of other disorders.
In the Freudian-dominated theories of the early twentieth century, it was a
sign of an “anal” character: hoarders refused to let go of what they had. By
the nineteen-eighties, Freudian theory was being shoved aside in favor of
empirical evidence, but hoarding was still treated as a symptom, particularly
of what was now called obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. The
innovation of the past decade was the proposal that hoarding was a disorder in
itself. With that claim, plus the prevalence estimates, which, however
conjectural, were confidently asserted, experts on the subject—there was now a
subject, and experts—felt safe in saying that hoarding presented “a major
threat to public health.”
For such a notion to be accepted, other professionals had
to climb on board. They did. Indeed, as Herring tells us, some were already
there. In the nineteen-eighties, Sandra Felton, a popular-psychology writer,
mounted an anti-clutter campaign based on a combination of Evangelical Christianity
(her husband was an Evangelical minister), self-help psychology, and addiction
narratives. In 1980, Felton founded a movement called Messies Anonymous,
inspired by Alcoholics Anonymous. By 1985, according to the Times, it
had more than six thousand members nationwide. Between 1983 and 2013, Felton
published more than a dozen books, with the collective message that clutter
was, if not an actual sin, at least a failure of self-understanding.
Less salvational, but certainly allied, was the rise of the
so-called “professional organizers,” people whom you could hire to come into
your house and get things in order. The National Association of Professional
Organizers now has almost four thousand members. Meanwhile, books started
rolling off the press: confessions of hoarding; descriptions of what it was
like to have a mother who was a hoarder; self-help books, with exercises and
checklists and scales, on which hoarders could be rated, from bad to worse.
Researchers began looking for evidence that hoarders might be suffering from
neurological abnormalities, possibly passed on from parent to child.
Finally, reality TV weighed in. The pioneer series was
“Hoarders,” which had six seasons on A & E, between 2009 and 2013. That was
followed by “Hoarding: Buried Alive,” which premièred on TLC in 2010. On
“Hoarders,” as on most reality TV, you never know how much reality you’re
seeing, but, from what one can tell, each episode is basically a structured
improvisation. The titles say that this is the story of So-and-So and
So-and-So. They are under the gun. They are about to be evicted, or their
children are going to be taken away by child-protective services, or they are
going to be charged with harboring animals in unsafe conditions.
Now the program shows us the hoarder’s house and, on the
stoop, the counsellor who has been sent over, plus a cleanup crew, usually two
men with a truck. (In most cases, the counsellor is a professional organizer or
a psychotherapist who specializes in hoarding or in obsessive-compulsive
behavior.) The counsellor rings the bell; the poor, nervous, guilty person
answers. The camera takes us into the house, and what we see beggars
description. Because it’s television, you can’t smell it, but the fact that the
counsellor and the cleanup crew wear masks means something. (“It’s like a blast
in your face,” one crew member says.) In some rooms, the debris is knee-deep.
In the house of Jill, a “food hoarder,” we are shown a fly strip that is more
flies than strip. A cleanup man begins to remove a pumpkin that she apparently
set great store by when she bought it. She stops him. He holds the slimy mass
up to her for inspection. She plucks a few seeds out of it—she’s going to
replant them, she says—and then she lets it go.
Sometimes the counsellors, but more often the hoarders
themselves, speculate about the emotional underpinnings of the problem. One
woman, Betty, says of her stuff, “It’s always there, and my family isn’t.”
Frequently, the hoarder’s adult children will arrive on the scene and agree that
the basic problem is a family quarrel, but one that has been mounted against
them: if the house is unnavigable and filthy, that’s to keep them from
visiting. “Rat poop!” Linda’s son cries in despair. “Old, wet valentine’s
cards!” You have to sympathize with him. From another house, Shirley’s, the
crew removes seventy-six cats, forty-one live ones and thirty-five dead ones.
The show’s producers have an interest in grossing us out, of course, but if
even half the refuse sitting on Shirley’s floor was there when they arrived,
and if DSM-V’s lowest estimate of the frequency of pathological
hoarding—two per cent of the population—is even half true, this really is a
serious public-health matter. Forget the fun, the nonconformity.
The Beales, even if their monthly allowances were small,
still owned Grey Gardens (which, after Big Edie’s death, in 1977, Little Edie
sold to Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn for two hundred and twenty thousand
dollars). The Collyers had been rich. By contrast, most of the hoarders we see
on reality TV are working-class people, and they don’t appear to be working.
Indeed, many of them seem to be on disability. According to the research, their
prognosis is not good—“Treatment failures are frequent,” an article in the
journal Depression and Anxiety says grimly—and reality-TV commentary,
for what it’s worth, agrees. This person, we’re told, refused treatment. That
person put all his stuff in storage and moved into his van. From the nineties
onward, we’re not looking at the cute raccoon, with a slice of bread. We’re
looking at the puddle on the floor, the defeat, the shame.
With the modern history of hoarding, we are now getting the
modern, or actually postmodern, explications. Scott Herring tells us about the
Collyers and the Beales and also Andy Warhol, who, apart from being a
formidable collector, was also a major hoarder. (At the end of a day, he would
often sweep the things on his desk—newspaper clippings, old letters, half a
sandwich—into a carton, label it “T.C.,” for time capsule, date it, and store
it.) But Herring says that he is not interested so much in hoarding as in
“discourses of material deviance”; that is, the web of thought and feeling
that, as a society, we have constructed around hoarding. The operative word
here is “deviance.” Herring repeatedly cites Michel Foucault (he might have
nodded at Thomas Szasz as well), to the effect that people in authority use
psychiatry as a means of social control. Like everyone else, Herring has a good
time describing hoarders’ houses—his chapter on the Collyers includes
hair-raising photographs—but he believes that people have a right to accumulate
as much junk as they want, and that campaigns against clutter are covert
attacks on more politicized versions of nonconformity. One is homosexuality: anti-clutter
campaigns are, in part, anti-gay, he believes. “Why are hoarders presumed to be
a threat to reproductive heterosexuals?” he says. Likewise, he believes that
racism was involved in the scandal over the Collyers. With their disorganized
house, he says, they seemed a symbol of what many people of the time viewed as
the social disorganization of African-American life. The Collyers were not
black, but their neighborhood, Harlem, became predominantly African-American
during their lifetime.
Herring’s argument, like most books written by professors
in defense of things thought to be deplored by upstanding people, can be
accused of slumming, and his prose epitomizes the fogbound language that we
generally find in such writings. Still, he has a point. It is hard to
understand why, all of a sudden, in the nineteen-nineties, we started seeing
houses that were inundated with rat droppings and old newspapers. Maybe he’s
wrong. Maybe the war between hoarding and anti-hoarding isn’t a struggle
between individualists and conformists. But, if not, then what is it? Also, why
does hoarding always seem to shift meanings? The stuff on the floor: it’s
treasure and it’s trash; it’s filth and it’s comfort. Hoarders have a mental
disorder, we’re told, but do we respond to them the way we do to people who
suffer from panic attacks or hallucinations? Don’t they seem to us marginally
creepier, and doesn’t that have to do with what our parents said about cleaning
up our rooms? Or do they seem marginally more heroic, because, unlike us, they
don’t obey their parents?
Whatever the truth of this, the situation is probably going
to get worse pretty soon, because of the well-established link between hoarding
and aging. By 2050, according to the Census Bureau, the number of Americans age
sixty-five or older will be about eighty-four million, almost double what it
was in 2012. That’s forty million more people who could end up on the porch
holding the plastic bag that the newspaper was delivered in and saying to
themselves, “Maybe I should hang on to this.”
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USA-
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We arrive in an unmarked car and without a uniform so that neighbors are not informed about the purpose of our presence. Our team is available during normal work hours, nights, and weekends to accommodate every schedule. We can bring rubbish containers, and have a specialized method for garbage removal so that it protects the privacy and needs of our clients.
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Trash Hoarders
The meaning of Trash Hoarders
Do you see a treasure chest in what others might call an
ordinary heap of garbage?
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As the name suggests, trash hoarders have a compulsion to hold
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by objects, and the owners literally walled in by rubbish.
This sort of lifestyle often forces individuals to hide
themselves away from visitors and live lives of solitude, as studies from the UCLA School of Medicine have shown.
The physical implications of such behavior can be equally
drastic as the garbage can restrict access to several rooms and utilities
throughout your house. In the most extreme cases, your living space becomes an
invitation for rodents and insects to build their homes, presenting a serious
health hazard. Even more frightening, it may be impossible to alert someone for
help in the case of a fire, flood, or other emergency, placing you in imminent
danger.
The Solution for Trash Hoarders
In a way, you may feel as though you’ve given up. It might
be that health issues have made you immobile and unable to keep up with chores.
Perhaps recent hardships or depression have put you behind and you lost the
drive to maintain a clean house, and what began as a down period in your life
spiraled out of control. You’re not alone. When people reach the point where
garbage has become the largest part of their existence, it can leave them
feeling as though they’ve hit rock bottom and are beyond help.
What many trash hoarders do not realize is that their
behavior is actually one of the easiest to correct. The cleaning process we can
restore even homes that have most suffered from a trash hoarding problem.
Within a short period of time, our highly efficient yet discreet methods will
declutter, disinfect, and deodorize every square inch of your property; we’ll
even repair and repaint any damaged areas. Our commercial-grade air purifier
eliminates 99% of odor-causing molecules that cause odors, so it when we’re
done, it will be like stepping into a brand new home.
The
Hoarders 911 team is trained to handle every situation with the utmost
delicacy.
We’re here to restore your life, not wrest it from you. We never make a decision about any of your belongings without asking permission first, and we remain conscious of the wishes of the client during every step of the process. When we have finished, you will be confident enough to open your house to guests—perhaps for the first time in years—and the sense of relief will be liberating. Let us assuage your fears by helping you see past the initial shock. You have already overcome the first and highest hurdle by your decision to seek help; as for the rest, we’ll take it from here.
We’re here to restore your life, not wrest it from you. We never make a decision about any of your belongings without asking permission first, and we remain conscious of the wishes of the client during every step of the process. When we have finished, you will be confident enough to open your house to guests—perhaps for the first time in years—and the sense of relief will be liberating. Let us assuage your fears by helping you see past the initial shock. You have already overcome the first and highest hurdle by your decision to seek help; as for the rest, we’ll take it from here.
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Worth Saving: Hoarding Pays Off for These Antiquers
Why would anyone keep old telephones from the 1940s?
What on earth can you do with a bunch of old railroad lanterns?
Is there any possible use for old Charles Chips and peanut butter tins?
“Of course,” say the antiques dealers who displayed their wares at Saturday’s Antiques & Collectibles Show in Lititz Springs Park.
Most of them admit to being pack rats who can never throw anything away. They have garages and storage rooms filled to the brim with their collections. A few have spouses who aren’t quite sure what to make of it all.
“We have a five-car garage that only has room for one car,” laughed Peg Kepner, wife of Dan Kepner, of New Danville.
Dan Kepner’s line is busy with old rotary telephones.
“I’ve had lots of people stop by, and the younger people have never seen them before,” said Kepner, who sells his phones for around $5 to $10.
Like Kepner, many of the dealers at the antique show might be called hoarders. Every once in a while, their tenancy to hang onto things pays off.
“I’m having an excellent day here,” said Jim Nuss.
Born and raised in Lititz, Nuss was on the Lititz Springs Park Board for many years. He ended up collecting lots of local memorabilia, like plates and mugs and maps and artwork and postcards. If it had anything to do with Lititz, Nuss added it to his collection.
As his wife Georgia explained, things have gotten a bit out of hand at the Nuss home. One of their bedrooms is stacked high with Lititz collectibles. The couple decided to downsize and find new homes for their many finds.
Jim Nuss loves Lititz memorabilia.
Nuss has old boxes of medicinal tonic that promised to cure rheumatism, stomach, liver, and kidney ailments. He had plates and trinkets made by pewter craftsman Jay Stauffer for park events.
And he had fly swatters.
They were all Lititz fly swatters, used as promotional give-aways by Lititz businesses like Ranck’s Meats, Bingy’s, and Keller Bros. Ford.
“If it’s from Lititz, I never get rid of it,” said Nuss. “Well, except for today.”
For Charlie Webb of York, his weakness is anything to do with the railroad. He explained that when he was a kid, his father loved the railroad. After he died, Webb kept all those railroad memories alive by collecting lanterns, model trains, railroad playing cards with Chessie the cat, and lots of fine china.
Back in the glory days of the railroad, first class passengers were served meals on real china. Each plate, cup and saucer was designed with the railroad motif, like the Broadway Limited initials and the Southern Pacific’s prairie wild mountain flower design.
Charlie Webb of York loves anything to do with railroads, including these antique railroad lamps.
His wife Patti is OK with his railroad passion. Her father worked for an auctioneer. So being with a man who never throws anything away is fine with her.
Sue Kopp, of Manheim, is also understanding of her husband’s obsession with collecting things. Ed Kopp has an eclectic array of collectibles like hatboxes, picnic baskets, coffee tins, Christmas ornaments, Coca Cola and Pepsi items, rolling pins, kitchen canisters and tins (like a rare Moseman’s peanut butter tin).
“It’s about our heritage and passing it on,” he said.
Ron Fisk of Berks County also had a wide assortment of antiques, such as postcards, fraktur and other paper items. He was selling his daughter’s Betty Boop collection because she had moved into a small apartment in New York. It seems that downsizing is the only way to stem the acquisition of more items.
And then there was Ken Bullough of Montgomery County, Md., who collects real live Yorkie dogs. While his wife was adding onto her glassware collection at the show, Bullough was sporting his four Yorkies, with two in stroller and two in chest carriers.
“Meet Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Prada and Coco Chanel,” he said, as he introduced them. Now that’s a fashion statement!
Laura Knowles is a freelance feature writer and regular contributor to the Record Express. She welcomes reader feedback at lknowles21@gmail.com.
http://lititzrecord.com/news/worth-saving-hoarding-pays-off-for-these-antiquers/
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CHILDREN OF HOARDERS...
Excuses We Hear
Typical behaviors seen in compulsive hoarding include:
• Saving far more items than are needed or can be used
• Acquisition of more items than can be used
• Avoidance of throwing things away
• Avoidance of making decisions
• Avoidance of putting possessions in appropriate storage areas, such as closets, drawers, or files
• Pervasive slowness or lateness in completing
-Obsessive Compulsive Foundation Hoarding Website
Heard from our hoarding parents, collected from members of the Children of Hoarders Yahoo support group:
1. My mom has specifically said that she was too much of an ‘intellectual’ than to focus on housework.
2. That she was “too busy taking care of the kids” to clean. Now the kids are out of the house and she’s still too busy.
3. She was sick, tired, achy, didn’t feel well, (insert favorite medical complaint here)… for SEVEN YEARS??
4. She was too busy at work to clean the house… but if she’s working so many hours, why is she still broke?
5. I’m OVERWHELMED I don’t know where to start.
6. I have had a headache for 3 days now.
7. I am so constipated I had to use a suppository again.
8. The phone keeps ringing with sales calls and it keeps distracting me.
9. I’m tired.
10. I don’t feel well *(this has been her excuse for EVERYTHING she doesn’t want to do since I can remember). *
11. I had a doctor’s appointment today and when I got home I was EXHAUSTED.
12. I AM working on ‘it’. It just takes me a long time to go through it all. You just don’t understand! There could be something valuable in there!
13. I took 22 trunkloads of donations to St. Vincent De Paul before I left Oregon!
14. I’ve made HUGE progress, but you just can SEE it because I’ve unpacked so much MORE now.
15. I can’t get rid of THESE things until you and your brother go through them ALL and tell me what you want. You know there will be SOMETHING in there because remember when I found ___fill in blank____ and you said you’d like to have it?!
16. *Regarding excessive compulsive recycling)*
I am protecting the planet for my grandchildren and their grandchildren by making sure that ANYthing that can be recycled or used is recycled or used. That is why I soak labels off jars and wash them thoroughly before I put them in the recycling bin. Imagine how much nicer it is for the recycling people when my
recycling is CLEAN.
17. My mom’s was always, I am working on it. I have a bag ready for (goodwill, salvatation army, take your pick. What can you say to that?
18) No time
19) Not enough money
20) I don’t know any better
21) I LIKE it that way!”
22. As soon as your brother gets his stuff out of here I can get organized.
23. Once I stop working I’ll have more time (5 years ago)
24. I just need to get through this medical issue (there’s always something)
25. My arthritis has been acting up
26. Big choir concert coming up
27. My dryer is taking too long to dry my clothes
28. I need some help carrying things out
29. I don’t have room to unpack my boxes
30. I just need to get organized
31. “I can’t get rid of this until your sister goes through it”
32. “I can’t clean out the closet until your Aunt comes over and tells me what she wants.”
33.”I can’t clean out the basement, your cousin in New York is convinced I was storing something of hers down there and that I threw it away because I can’t find it. Now, I can’t throw anything away in case someone wants it one day.” Regarding the “Cousin” excuse, I think it’s very likely my mom still has said object buried under years of junk.
34) I’ll get to it when I’m on vacation
35) I can’t do it now, my back and/or asthma is acting up
36) It’s all the stuff I bought for you kids when you were growing up.
37) I couldn’t do it when I was on vacation because (insert one) you, my mom, your sister, my sister, my friend, random person I barely know needed me because (inset one) they were sick, they were lonely, they are going through a divorce, they are in town only for a few days.
38. I’m going to have yardsale, so I don’t want to throw away anything until after that.
39. I grew up during the war when we had to “make do and mend”
40. You were so messy as a kid that I just got disheartened ( I’m 45 now and haven’t lived with her in more than 25 years!)
41. The place is in a mess because of that cleaner you insisted I have (huh?)
42. I have a hunger for knowledge (justification for hoarding books, newspapers and magazines and effectively a variant on the intellectual excuse)
43. I have to make a phone call.
44. I have to pay a bill.
45. I have to go get the mail.
46. That’s sharp/glass/corrosive/poisonous. I have to figure out how to wrap it so
the trash men don’t hurt themselves. (“Corrosive/poisonous”, BTW, referred to _empty_
Drano bottles.)
47. I don’t know if the Goodwill wants those, but I can’t throw them away until I find out.
48.I can’t donate those while they’re so dirty, but I don’t know how to clean them.
49. I heard that there’s a really good consignment shop somewhere nearby.
50. “I moved from a 5 bedroom house into a 2 bedroom apartment, and this stuff is too good to throw away.”
51. “I’m saving that for someone else.”
52. “I’m going to be feeding that to the animals.”
53. “That’s an antique that will be worth a lot of money someday.”
54. “I can’t do it today, I have to go to Costco.”
55. “There’s too much going on right now.”
Always followed by, “After the holidays/birthday/ anniversary/ medical appt/summer/ start of school/football season/your father’s health is better/whatever. .. I’m going to start making some headway.”
56. “I’ll get around to it when everything is all squared away.”
57. “I paid good money for that!”
58. You don’t understand, maybe I could use it!
59. What if they stop making that medication and I need it later? Then I’ll be glad I have these bottles! (about expired meds from 8 YEARS ago)
60. Maybe the vet might ask what medication the old dog took. (referring to expired pet meds for a long dead dog, originally bought in 1974)
61. You just have control issues and can’t stand to see me enjoy my things.
62. Your brother might WANT those! What if he visits but forgets to bring any underwear?
63. I could use all those clothes for rags. I just haven’t gotten to sorting and cutting them up.
64. If I hide my stuff in drawers and just in that one room, nobody has to know.
65. My mother was an alcoholic and I lost so many things. I deserve to have all this now.
66. Well, if I remove my clothes/magazines/catalogs/photographs your father will just bring in more of his books/food items/gardening tools, and that wouldn’t be fair. He’s the one with the real problem. [Father has the same thing to say about Mother. They both have issues.][Maybe this keeps their marriage together?]
67. Here’s my mom’s excuse for filling up her 3 bedroom house to the rafters: “It’s all a big puzzle. I’m gathering all of the pieces. When I have all of the pieces of what I need for my house, I can begin to put them together and finally have the house I really want.”
68. Hey – don’t throw that out. I’m saving it for; a) church b) a quilt c) the nurse who looks after me d) you.
69. I can’t start on any projects. You kids might need me.
70. “I can’t throw this away. It’s a collector’s item.”
71. “You’ve never walked a mile in my moccasins! You can’t understand what my life is like!”
72. “It’s stupid to throw things away that I might have to buy again later (said about items in a room she hasn’t seen in 13 years). ”
73. “When summer vacation is over and the kids go back to school then I will be able to tackle it.”
74. “I’ve got a lot coming at me.”
75. “Mother’s reasons for hoarding: Your father drives me so crazy I can’t think straight and can’t make decisions about this.” (howdidyouhear: boston globe article)
76. “I only feel safe surrounded by stuff. Birds make nests and you don’t humiliate them. I just want to live all cozy inside a space filled with things I want, that I like, that make me feel safe. My stuff protects me.”
77. 4/28/08:
“All this stuff belongs to you kids – we can’t throw it out!”
(I found 1 dress of mine from high school in an entire room that was packed and 1 box of yearbooks of mine in a packed pole barn…)
78. 4/29/08:
“YOU never helped me.”
(My mother’s house has been covered in garbage and things since I was born)
79.
4/29/08:
message: “I have to find the right e-bay storefront. Do they list themselves in the phone book?”
80.
4/29/08:
message: I don’t have time, and overworked — she hasn’t worked in over a year since she divorced my father. She’s living off of the money from the divorce, the sale of the old house (which was also trashed and we got little money for anyway), and child support payments. It’s your sisters job.
And the best of all: The women’s liberty movement. Women don’t have to do anything anymore. Men should do it all. Women have been doing all the work since the beginning of time. Now it’s the men’s turn to see what it’s like.
81.
5/2/08
message: “I was so abused and deprived as a child that I now have ‘abundance issues’. Your grandmother was a child abuser and alcoholic and druggie and now I’m going to have the childhood I missed out on.” (How having mounds of papers and clothing and never cleaning up cat vomit on the floor could make up for a crummy childhood, I never understood.)
82.
“I’ve read part of it!”said about every self help book she owns(she owns over 280 no joke)
83.
Me: “Why are you keeping that ad? it’s expired.”
Mom: “They might do the same discount again.”
Dad: “Why can’t I throw away the years-old newspapers? It’s old news.”
Mom: “There might be a recipe in there I want to try/There might be a historic article/I accidentally put money between
84.
“It’s for a baby shower for someone at work!” (Really? You’re going to give this person that whole truckful of toys, baby books and diapers?) P.S. This is a household where there have not been children in well over 10 years.
85.
My mother has come home from a yard sale already with something totally useless and when I ask her why she bought it she says, “I’m going to sell it at a yard sale!” Umm yeah…that makes sense.
86.
The Yard: “I’m making oxygen for the planet “(the weeds are over her head).
The House: ” I’m helping the planet by not filling the landfills.”
87.
My mum usually starts a conversation with “I am in utter chaos, the house is a mess and I have started to attack the bedroom” (that’s if I am coming over to her house). If she comes to my home she will screw her nose up in disgust if I have dish washing detergent congealed on the nozzle of the bottle.
It’s as if the house is a living entity and it is making life hard for her, a huge mountain to try and conquer in stress, anxiety and pain.
88.
(34 year old child) “You can’t afford to keep all that stuff.”
(Hoarding father) “I can’t afford not to. What does it cost me?”
(Child) “It costs you the use of your house, your relationships, your career, and it
may cost you your life.”
(Father) “I’ll think about that.” (10 years ago)
89.
“When I’m dead then you can throw it all away. That’ll make you happy.”
90.
“I made a little clearing, but I’m the only one that can tell it.”
91.
“Jane those are MY THINGS, leave MY THINGS alone. This is MY house and I
like it.”
92.
“Your grandmother is in her 80’s confronting her will hurt her feelings lets
just wait till she dies the we’ll claen out the house! ”
93.
“Your father won’t let me throw that out. If he knew I threw that out he’d have a fit, and I can’t deal with that right now.”
94.
“My neighborhood association doesn’t allow yard sales.”
http://childrenofhoarders.com/wordpress/?page_id=1483
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