When Possessions Rule Your Life

by: Julia M. Klein

Not until my mother died last year, at 82, did I realize how much she had saved. Her attic, closets and drawers overflowed with Playbills and travel brochures; size two designer dresses from the 1960s; broken appliances; baby furniture; expense receipts and stock annual reports; scrapbooks and photo albums; magazines and newspaper clippings; and every letter, greeting card and announcement she had ever received. It was an embarrassment of riches—and of junk. My exasperation was tempered by a sudden realization: I was hoarding identical emblems of my past, from Playbills and newspaper clippings to ancient letters from almost-forgotten lovers.

So it was with both interest and trepidation that I picked up Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee’s new book, Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things. To my relief, I discovered that my mother and I were rank amateurs compared with the pseudonymous subjects of this book, who live among clutter so overwhelming that they scarcely have room to walk, or eat, or sleep. Before treatment, Irene mixed empty boxes, expired coupons and old newspapers with photographs of her children, important documents, even cash. Pamela tried to take care of 200 cats, filling her house with excrement. Ralph stockpiled rusty, broken objects and stacked moldy newspapers so high that they threatened to crush him.

Frost, professor of psychology at Smith College, and Steketee, professor and dean of the School of Social Work at Boston University, have been studying hoarding for nearly two decades and have developed a cognitive-behavioral approach to helping hard-case hoarders. But their book, with its insight into the magic and meaning of ordinary objects, speaks to the hoarder in all of us. I asked Frost to elaborate on some of their findings. (Read an excerpt from Stuff.)

Q. How did you first become interested in hoarding?

A. My interest began with a simple question from a student. We were discussing obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the student asked, “Why are there no studies of hoarding?” I couldn’t answer. So we placed an ad in the local newspaper looking for a “pack rat” to interview. We got more than 100 phone calls. I was hooked.

Behind the Piles: A Look At Why People Hoard

By: Paul Raeburn

The new book Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things looks at the nature of hoarders, and the reasons why some people hoard. Co-author and professor of psychology Randy Frost describes his work, and explains why changing a hoarder's behavior is difficult..." More

A Q&A with Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee, Authors of Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things

Q: What is hoarding, and how does it differ from collecting?

A: Two behaviors characterize hoarding: acquiring too many possessions and difficulty in getting rid of them when they are no longer useful or needed. When these behaviors lead to the kind of clutter and disorganization that disrupts or threatens a person's health or safety, or they lead to significant distress, then hoarding becomes a disorder. Simply collecting or owning lots of things does not qualify as hoarding.

A major feature of hoarding is the large amount of disorganized clutter that creates chaos in the home. Rooms can no longer be used as they were intended, moving around the house is difficult, exits are blocked, and life inside the home becomes dysfunctional. Collectors typically keep their possessions well organized, and each item differs from other items to form an interesting and often valuable collection. Further, an important purpose of collecting is to display the special items so that others can appreciate them. People who hoard are seldom able to accomplish such goals.

Q: What kinds of things do hoarders typically save?

A: While it may appear that people who hoard save only trash or things of no real value, in fact most people who hoard save almost everything. Often this includes things that were purchased but never removed from their original wrappers. The most frequent items saved are clothes and newspapers. Other commonly hoarded items include containers, junk mail, books, and craft items.

Q: What factors contribute to the development of hoarding?

A: People who hoard often have deficits in the way they process information. For example, they are often highly distractible and show symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. These symptoms make is difficult for them to concentrate on a task without being diverted by other things..." More (scroll towards the bottom of the Amazon order page for the balance of this interview)

Interview with Randy Frost, Part I Compulsive Hoarding Disorder Definition and Causes

By Sere Halverson

Editor’s Note: We recently sat down with Randy Frost to discuss compulsive hoarding disorder – a fascinating and complex problem that affects from 2.5 to 5 percent of the population, many who are elderly.

Randy has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and is a professor of psychology at Smith College. He is one of the leading authorities on compulsive hoarding disorder. He has co-authored two books, a self-help book entitled Buried in Treasures: Help for Compulsive Acquiring, Saving and Hoarding, and a therapist manual entitled Compulsive Hoarding and Acquiring: Therapist Guide and Workbook. Randy has been featured on The Dr. Oz Show, NPR and ABC News and has been interviewed for articles for numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Newsweek.

Randy had so much valuable information about the causes and characteristics of hoarding, and how best to try to help a loved one with a hoarding problem, that we’ve divided this interview into several parts that we’ll post throughout the coming weeks. Keep checking back for more.

icarevillage: Randy, will you explain to our readers what compulsive hoarding disorder is?

Randy: Compulsive hoarding is the acquisition of and the failure to discard a large number of possessions. Many of us engage in this type of behavior to some extent. We all collect things, we all have a lot more possessions than we probably need. But there are two important distinctions that point to a disorder rather than the more common behavior of collecting.

First, the accumulation is so vast that it clutters living spaces and makes them unusable. For instance, you can’t sit on the couch because it’s full of stuff, as is the kitchen sink, the kitchen table, the bathtub, and so on.

The other component is the level of distress and impairment the hoarding causes. While the person usually enjoys the act of collecting, the distress occurs when they worry about someone seeing the home, or become anxious about having to get rid of any possessions.

The hoarding causes significant impairment. It affects their ability to handle financial affairs, because when your home is filled with disorganized stuff, it’s easy to lose bills and important papers. The home is often unsafe because exits are blocked. There are fire hazards.

Appliances often stay broken. The person with a hoarding problem is afraid to have anyone into the house for repairs because the home’s condition may be reported to authorities. We’ve seen elderly people who have no working refrigerator, no working stove, sometimes no working hot water – sometimes no water at all, which means no working bathroom.

icarevillage: So we’re talking about much, much more than just a disorganized, messy house. Hoarding can become a serious problem that causes unfit living conditions and puts people in danger. Are the elderly more susceptible to compulsive hoarding?

Randy: We do see a lot of hoarding behavior in the elderly. But interestingly, when we ask older people how long they have been hoarding and how long their home has been like this, most of them tell us it’s been going on all their lives.

So we’re not sure if there is a separate kind of phenomenon of hoarding that begins in old age. Most of the research on the onset of hoarding suggests that the behavior itself starts sometime around age 12 or 13, but doesn’t become a problem for several decades after that.

One of the reasons why hoarding in the elderly may be so much more apparent to us is that while the hoarding behavior may have always been present, when people get older they lose some of their ability to cognitively process things. They lose some of their resources for handling things, they move more slowly, and so forth. So aging increases the severity of the behavior. But we suspect that the hoarding behavior probably was there most of their lives. And we’ve seen people who are as young as 19 with serious hoarding problems, so it’s definitely not limited to the elderly.

icarevillage: Do you know what causes hoarding?

Randy: We think that people who hoard process information in several unusual ways. A person with a hoarding problem pays attention to the unique detail in objects, such as the shape, the color, the texture, and so forth. For example, take a bottle cap. They might focus on these details and give it value rather than focusing on the fact that it’s a bottle cap without a bottle and therefore has no useful function.

Another feature of information processing that differs in the person that hoards has to do with the amount of information they pay attention to with respect to an object. So they will look at an object and focus on all its unusual details and those details will have meaning. When that person tries to make a decision about that object, they’re faced with many more details to consider than most of us are. Therefore, making any kind of decision requires taking a large amount of information and filtering it down and using it to come to a conclusion – and this is very difficult for them. It affects everything they do, from ordering off a menu to choosing what to wear in the morning. These are decisions they sometimes struggle with for long periods of time.

The other characteristic of people who hoard has to do with the way in which they organize their lives. Most of us organize our lives categorically. We get an electricity bill, we put it the category called bills, and when we need to find it we can go to that location. But people who hoard seem for the most part to organize visually and spatially instead. So if you ask them where their last electricity bill is, they’re likely to tell you that it is halfway down in the middle of the pile in this room, because that’s where they saw it last. Their organization occurs by remembering where objects are in space.

Now, a lot of us organize some things this way. My desk is organized like this – I have piles of things and I remember what’s there because I last saw it there. But if I were to do that for all my possessions, that system would break down quickly..." More

Professor's exploration of hoarding garners attention

By: Clare Lynch

Almost two decades ago, psychology professor Randy Frost's involvement with hoarding began with an inauspicious question posed in a seminar on obsessive-compulsive disorder.

"One of the students asked about hoarding, and I said I didn't know anything about it, and nobody else did either, because you don't see it often," Frost said. "We decided to see if we could find someone who had this problem who would be willing to be interviewed for the project. So we put an ad in the newspaper looking for pack rats or chronic savers, and we got a hundred telephone calls."

Frost's research has advanced rapidly since 1991. He is now a nationally known expert on compulsive hoarding behavior. His book on hoarding, Stuff, co-written with Gail Steketee, will be published in April.

Hoarding itself has garnered a similar increase in attention, progressing from a little-known subset of obsessive-compulsive disorder to a field in its own right.

Compulsive hoarding behavior has three components, Frost explained. Hoarders first have problems with over-acquisition through compulsive buying or collecting of free objects. They then become so attached to those objects that they are unable to let them go. Finally, hoarders have a problem organizing their belongings..." More