Reply #125: Salon.com: "Stuff": The psychology of hoarding

[Shallah Kali]

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/04/25/hoarding_interview_stuff



A lot of the cases you describe in the book are quite extreme -- people who lose spouses or go bankrupt because of their hoarding problem. What causes them to let possessions take over their lives?

One is a sense of intense responsibility for objects and an unwillingness to waste them. Another is this sense of objects as opportunities. One of the hoarders in the book compares her hoarding to a "river of possibilities," because each object is a world of possibility for her. And then there's the emotional or magical quality that possessions have. They connect people to the world. For that particular hoarder, her possessions connected her to the world around her and without them she felt she would somehow lose that. They were also a part of her identity; if she got rid of them she would lose a piece of herself.

And then there's an aesthetic quality to the hoarding. Another hoarder we wrote about in the book created piles from stuff that she’d collected, and at some point, this pile became a work of art. When most of us look at an object like a bottle cap, we think, "This is useless," but a hoarder sees the shape and the color and the texture and the form. All these details give it value. Hoarding may not be a deficiency at all -- it may be a special gift or a special ability. The problem is being able to control it.

snip

Do you think these shows are exploitative?

If you spend one weekend with someone with a camera crew, a cleaning crew and no therapy, you’re making some educational contribution by showing people what hoarding is -- and that it’s really an illness -- but it gives the impression that what you should do with someone who has this type of problem is bring in a cleaning crew and start pressuring them. But if you do that when the person isn't ready, the home will be back to its original state, or even worse, in short order.

You can’t change this behavior in TV time; it’s a long-term process. But that's not as dramatic as when you’ve got a burly cleaning crew throwing out someone’s prized collection of 10-year-old newspapers. In our treatment, we start with having somebody throw out a single item, and the purpose of the treatment is not to clear the clutter, the purpose is to change the behavior and to change the nature of these people's attachments to possessions. Once those things change, then the clutter will be easier to deal with.