ON 21 March 1947, police arrived at a home in New York’s Harlem district, after a neighbour called convinced there was a dead body inside. Confronted by walls of newspapers and other junk, officers had difficulty getting in. One patrolman finally squeezed through a second floor window and found a warren of twisting passageways lined with bric-a-brac, some armed with booby traps. After scaling a mountain of junk he discovered the emaciated body of 65-year-old Homer Collyer. More than two weeks later, as the clean-up continued, the corpse of his brother Langley was unearthed some 3 metres from where Homer had died.
Amassing more than 150 tonnes of stuff, including 14 grand pianos, the Collyers became a notorious example of hoarding. But if the craze for decluttering tells us anything, it’s that many of us find it difficult to throw things away. Despite the feeling of catharsis that dumping our junk can bring, our possessions often outgrow our homes: around , for example, rent a unit in one of the country’s nearly 53,000 self-storage facilities. And for up to one in 20 of us, hoarding is a diagnosable psychological disorder (see “Do you have a hoarding problem“).
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But you needn’t be sleeping on newspapers or wading through piles of clothes to have experienced the pain of letting go. Why can it hurt so much to get rid of stuff you will never need again? Researchers investigating what’s going on inside the minds of people with hoarding disorder have uncovered some intriguing paradoxes. Their findings can also help those of us who would like to better understand our motives for amassing clutter – or identify strategies to get rid of it.
It’s tempting to think of hoarding as a modern problem – a regrettable by-product of consumerist culture. In fact, it has ancient roots. Many animals stockpile food to prepare for harsh winters or guard against theft by other animals. Likewise, our prehistoric hunter-gatherer ancestors benefited from hiding supplies so that wild animals and other bands of early humans wouldn’t get to them. Archaeologists have uncovered such stashes dating back almost 10,000 years, containing food, jewellery and more. “I suspect that any culture where there’s a large number of relatively inexpensive, easily accessible things will have a significant hoarding problem,” says Randy Frost at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Read more: Stuff – Humans as hunters and mega-gatherers
Reality TV may have brought hoarding to public attention recently, but it’s almost 25 years since Frost helped pioneer research in the field when he placed an advertisement in a newspaper calling for chronic savers and pack rats. We now know that between . Most are diagnosed in middle age, and there is some evidence that the . However, hoarding behaviours are thought to begin quite early, even in adolescence. “Often, we finally see people in treatment when they’re 50 [or so], but they’ve been hoarding for decades, and that means that they have a huge volume of stuff and the problem is severe,” said Jessica Grisham from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
Until recently, hoarding disorder was seen as part of obsessive compulsive disorder. But there are key differences. People with OCD go through their daily lives haunted by negative thoughts, which influence their behaviour. Hoarding, by contrast, includes positive emotions. “In addition to the anxiety and distress people feel when throwing things away, there’s also this kind of addictive element, a pleasurable side of hoarding that you don’t see in OCD,” says Grisham. “People who hoard often like their stuff, they feel pleasure, joy and happiness and love toward their possessions.” The growing realisation that this is not the same as OCD meant that in 2013, hoarding got a separate classification in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the standard guidebook for mental health professionals.
Brain studies reinforce the idea that hoarding involves a distinct pattern of thinking. Only small studies have been done so far, but there is clear evidence that people with hoarding problems show different kinds of brain activation during decision-making tasks compared with individuals with OCD and those without either condition. In particular, regions of the brain responsible for understanding how important something is relative to something else “get turned all the way up” in people with hoarding problems, says David Tolin at the Institute of Living, a psychiatric hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. “The brain is not functioning in a way that is conducive to making rapid, intuitive decisions, and instead the person has to think really hard about everything.”
“despite the clutter, they tend to have perfectionist qualities”
Tolin and his colleagues used fMRI to explore what happens inside the brains of people with hoarding disorder when asked to decide whether to keep or discard their own letters and papers and others that did not belong to them. The team found involved in decision-making, such as those related to assigning values and making value judgements – but only when volunteers were making decisions about their own stuff. We may all have this problem to some extent. Since the 1980s, behavioural economists have been exploring the so-called endowment effect – the tendency to assign a higher value to things that belong to us than to those that do not. Even if you have only just acquired an object, the pain of losing it increases as a result of possessing it.
The problems of people with hoarding disorder extend beyond decisions about their own possessions, though. Last year, Christina Hough and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, asked people with hoarding disorder to carry out , and found overactivity in some of the brain regions implicated in Tolin’s work.
Creative thinking
This group also showed increased activity in visual regions of the brain compared with other people. This fits with the idea that people who are inclined to hoard process information in a more complex way. Instead of organising their possessions efficiently, by category, they may . “Many of them seem to have a mental map of the pile in the middle of the room and can tell you, roughly, where things are in it,” says Frost. They also tend to pay attention to unusual details in objects, seeing beauty where others see mundaneness. A person with hoarding disorder might think of 10 different things to do with an old soda can, and use that to justify keeping it. “[They] do seem like very intelligent, very creative people,” says Tolin. “But a strength can eventually become a weakness.”
Hough’s team found something else intriguing, too. Brain activity indicated that people with hoarding disorder are highly aware of their potential to make a bad decision, even when it doesn’t really matter. This fits with the idea that, in spite of their disorganised clutter, they tend to have perfectionist qualities. They might intend to read all their magazines from cover to cover before getting rid of them, for example, or they might be hampered by their desire to dispose of objects in the best way possible.
Although each person with a hoarding problem is unique, there are certain patterns of thinking that clinicians often see. People who hoard often maintain that it’s better to save items that could be useful in the future than to dispose of them. Many talk about a sense of responsibility towards their things, wanting to make sure that they get properly recycled or donated or used to their fullest extent. They may keep things simply because they find them attractive. However, often they develop emotional attachments to objects, seeing them as mementos and even imbuing them with person-like qualities.
These ways of thinking are not unique to hoarding disorder. “We all save things because we’re sentimentally attached, or we think they could be useful, or we think they are pretty. It’s just that someone with hoarding problems will carry that to an extreme,” says long-time hoarding researcher Gail Steketee of Boston University. Grisham agrees: “The kinds of beliefs of people with hoarding problems are similar to the ones everyone endorses, just at a much higher level, about many more things.”
It’s still not clear why some people develop a hoarding problem, but we do know that it tends to run in families, and there has been . “We think that you don’t inherit hoarding per se. You inherit something that makes you vulnerable to having a hoarding problem,” says Steketee.
So, what should you do if you think this applies to a family member or friend? “Don’t argue about hoarding, ever. You will lose,” says Tolin. Indeed, it can make things worse: when criticised, people who hoard often get defensive and become even more entrenched in their habits. Instead, encourage them to seek professional help. Cognitive behavioural treatments lasting several months can have “reasonably good results”, says Tolin. They work by instilling strategies for managing the condition. But they cannot cure it.
For anyone trying to address a hoarding problem, Tolin, Steketee and Frost have some advice in their book Buried in Treasures: Help for compulsive acquiring, saving, and hoarding. First you should examine your values and motivations for bringing objects into our homes. Then you should come up with rules about what you allow yourself to acquire. Organising your possessions in systematic ways will also help. But letting go of things will be a struggle. “It involves dealing with the beliefs you hold and the emotions you experience,” says Steketee. That’s not easy, but you can change. “It takes time. It’s like a muscle that you build.”
Do you have a hoarding problem?
Few people’s lives are free from clutter but there are telltale signs. Here’s :
• Keeping things that are broken or lack monetary value.
• Difficulty categorising or organising possessions.
• Severe anxiety when attempting to discard items.
• Indecision about what to keep and where to put things.
• Extreme attachment to items and suspicion of others touching them.
• Clutter that interferes with relationships and daily living.
Most wanted
:
• Newspapers/magazines
• Plastic bags
• Photographs
• Household appliances
• Food
• Clothing
This article appeared in print under the headline “Excess baggage”
