January 12, 2010
compulsive hoarding
While the term “compulsive hoarding” is relatively new, the condition is not. In the 1800s, doctors often diagnosed something called “collector’s mania.” Hoarding is frequently seen as a problem of the elderly or a holdover from Depression-era frugality, yet the mean age of hoarders is 50, and the tendency often manifests as early as age 3, notes Randy Frost, a professor of psychology at Smith College and expert on the disorder. Compulsive hoarding affects both sexes and all economic classes.
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I know a number of people with this disorder. It’s very sad, although it’s fascinating from a clinical perspective. It is thought by some psychologists to be a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but that seems unlikely, given that hoarders do not respond to the same therapy or drug treatment that eases symptoms of OCD.
I suspect this is a far more common problem than people realize, given that hoarders tend to be ashamed of their homes and don’t allow people to see them.
Several months ago, a man I’d known my entire life–a world-famous neurosurgeon, as a matter of fact–died along with his wife in their Houston mansion because firefighters couldn’t get up the stairs, which were blocked by boxes stacked to the ceiling. None of us knew his wife was a hoarder until after their deaths.
I worry.
I have a simple solution: Hoard your things in a storage warehouse, then slack off on paying your rent.
I worry about it, too–especially these days, when our house looks like a tornado hit it. But I’m pretty sure I’m just lazy. I tend to stockpile certain things (I used to have a problem with canned tomatoes, for instance), but I can always overcome the urge to hoard in favor of the greater feeling that comes from neatness and organization. My problem these days is that I don’t have the will/energy/whatever to roll up my sleeves and purge.
I have a simple solution: Go on the lam.
[...] Do I have backups of all my important files? Will I feel relieved that I no longer have to worry about whether I’m becoming a hoarder, because all my stuff will be gone? Will I remember even [...]
When you live in one place for a long period of time, it’s hard not to accrue all sorts of junk. Moving helps.
That story about the neurosurgeon is far out. Especially in the light of India’s fire post.
You might think that, being an archivist and all, I would be a keeper. Well, I am, but it’s an inclination that gives me the shivers. Giving a periodic heave-ho to a load of detritus feels good. In fact, just yesterday I pitched out four big garbage bags of ‘stuff’.
I have trouble separating the actual uses of things from their potential. And I have trouble denying myself the pleasure of owning pretty things. When “Jane” in the video linked above held up the plate she’d just gotten and said how pretty it was, I thought of the rainbow of vintage melamine dishes I bought myself from Etsy over the holidays while searching for a particular sugar bowl to replace my mom’s broken one.
• Tea service for about a dozen (green and blue), and, because a lot of it came in sets and one seller sent me a gift because I was her first customer, three sugar bowl–and-creamer pairs (green, pink, red).
• Two Rosti of Denmark mixing bowls, although I already have a zillion of them in all different sizes, because these two were in beautiful colors I’d never seen (green, brown).
• Three yellow Rosti storage containers, the kind that come in different sizes, sometimes labeled “Flour,” “Sugar,” and “Coffee.” I put flour in the largest and sugar in the midsize box, but I don’t drink coffee and can’t decide what substance is worthy of filling the smallest container. I have dozens of tins of tea (another hoard), but not enough of any one to put in there.
• A divided serving bowl (green)
• a plastic (but not melamine) sewing pattern box (green)
The teacups and sugar bowls and creamers are things I typically use only two weeks out of the year, when I have my annual Ladies’ Teas, for which I require only one sugar bowl and two creamers. The rest of the time, they sit in a cabinet—which is already full, so I have no place to put the new ones.
Just before Christmas, I sneaked downstairs at night and filled the paper recycling bins next to the building with old magazines. I’d torn off the address labels so the super couldn’t tell who’d had the insanity to keep copies of Wired, Bust, Health, and Prevention from so many years ago. I hate magazines; they pile up so quickly, and I rarely read them. Some of the WIreds were still in their shrink wrap. I’m forever canceling subscriptions, yet a few magazines keep trickling in.
I won’t bother telling you about the clothes. Or the books.
Shortly after Christmas, on the eve of the first of the season’s tea parties, I called a car service and took about a dozen bags of donations to Housing Works: books, clothes, housewares. These were only the nice things I was getting rid of, because Housing Works is rather fancy. Among these things were books that had been left by the boyfriend I kicked out in 2000. It took a few weeks to get him out the door but ten years to do the same with his books.
I do get rid of things occasionally, and I don’t collect abject trash, as my aunt used to do (and probably still does; nobody else has been in her house for years and years, as far as I know), but I also accumulate totally unnecessary stuff, in certain categories. Like my grandfather, whose house, when we went to clean it out, was layered ankle deep with unread newspapers, magazines, and books (and fried chicken remains, and dogshit, and fleas), I tend to collect aspirational items, things that represent who I would like to be: a person who reads more, cooks more, cleans more, entertains more, has more occasions to wear party dresses. Giving those objects up is admitting that I’m not about to become that person.
Which also worries me.
Mmmnh, those aspirational items are tough to give up. However. Ahem.
No, I’m really never going to lay down a fabulous tile mosaic entryway.
No, I’m never going to find the right underwear to wear under that gorgeous sheer little black dress he bought me ten years ago, and besides, now I’m too fat and my neck is too scrawny.
No, I am not going to commence seasoning and drying enough beef jerky to last through the winter.
Nor am I going to cross-country ski every day there’s snow from now till April.
I wouldn’t even want to know that person. (Though it’s a shame about the little black dress.)
Oh these are all good micro stories. So much suggested by way of the things we hesitate to discard. I wonder if it’s related in some significant way to procrastination: saving the thing as a proxy for actually doing something with it.
Cindy and I have dozens of stories we could tell about people we have known who are or were hoarders. I think, though, that it’s the saving of trash that really marks the boundary between cluttered and creepy. Rooms become minds, and when the person is gone and the place must be cleaned–a muttered posthumous telepathy remains.
Know what I’ve learned from this thread? That I can find vintage melamine plates on Etsy. Here we go….
[...] Daryl Scroggins: I think, though, that it’s the saving of trash that really marks the boundary between cluttered and creepy. Rooms become minds, and when the person is gone and the place must be cleaned–a muttered posthumous telepathy remains. [...]
I am thinking of Phil’s photographs of his mother-in-law’s home and of how she is at the opposite end of the hoarding spectrum from those who stockpile — in the sense that she does not want to leave behind clutter for others to clear away.
I’m going to have to make voice notes as I go through the boxes at my mother’s house. I have things there because I either don’t need them or don’t have room for them here. There is some question as to which group is a subset of the other.
There is a point at which you ask, “To what end?” Seems to me you’re approaching that point, Dave, and that’s good.
My dad did a lot of purging during his last years, throwing out things without consulting or notifying anybody. It’s his sister who’s the hoarder of trash, and it was he who’d always (semi)jokingly said to Mom, whenever she brought home a new book, “But you already had a book!” He was a thrower out of things, and of sentiment.
He sold my mother’s bicycle one week after I’d been talking with her about taking it out of the basement and getting it tuned up so I could ride it. He put out the couch that we’d loved but that had become too low for Mom to sit on—it was always the best one to sleep on; you felt cradled and secure—right before the trash pickup, so that nobody else had time to retrieve it off the street. It was still a good couch; someone would have wanted it. Mom watched from the window in tears as the garbage men threw it into the truck and crushed it to splinters. It wasn’t until after Dad was gone that we wondered what had happened to the electronic clock he’d built, which had sat in the living room blinking out the time for at least twenty-five years. Did it stop working, and had he, having forgotten how to fix it, throw it out? Or did he just throw it out? We don’t know when it went missing, but we miss it now.
This is the other extreme I hold in my head: throwing out too much, or throwing things out in The Wrong Way. Some losses mean more than others. I eventually got a bike, though not until years later. The faithful couch had already been replaced with a higher one, which nobody likes to sit on, much less sleep on. The clock is irreplaceable. I could probably build something like it now, with the help of some less electronics-impaired friends, but even if it looked and worked exactly the same, it wouldn’t be the one that Dad made.
And, of course, I’d gladly give up everything I own to have my dad back. Then we could rebuild the clock together.