When People Hoard

Is your apartment cluttered with stacks of newspapers up to your chin and towers of unread magazines that have reached almost nosebleed heights? Just to get from the living room to the bedroom, do you have to tiptoe over Christmas wrapping paper from the 1980s, junk mail from your college days, and a broken TV that hasn't worked since the final episode of M*A*S*H?

You might call yourself a "collector" or maybe even a "pack rat." But for the psychologists who study people like you, they'd probably label you a "hoarder."

When your junkaholic behaviors involve acquiring and keeping objects that appear to have limited if any value, and they begin to take over your living space, you meet the definition of a hoarder. Such people can't make a decision about the worth of anything, from food tins to tattered receipts, and over a period of years, they may accumulate mountains of "stuff" that can eventually leave them isolated and almost incapacitated in their own homes. Their possessions may cover their floors, couches, chairs, tables, and beds. They may have to wade through knee-deep piles of debris just to get to the bathroom.

At its worst, hoarding can become a health and safety hazard, with the clutter posing a fire risk, and making it almost impossible for repairmen to enter their homes to fix a leaky faucet or a refrigerator on the blink. Yet hoarders continue to add to their "collections" with no willingness to discard any of it.

"These are people who can no longer use entire rooms in their homes because of all of their possessions," says Gail Steketee, PhD, professor at the Boston University School of Social Work. "They may lose their medications in the piles and have to repurchase them. They may file their taxes late, if at all, because they can't find the paperwork they need."

Trash or Treasure?

When it comes to hoarding, one man's junk is another man's treasure. "Most of us are attached to things we inherited from our parents or grandparents, or we're attached to photographs or special items that we've bought," says Steketee. "But people with hoarding problems often become emotionally attached to items that strike the rest of us as junk, or to pieces of paper that aren't particularly interesting."

Hoarders may become anxious and angry at the mere suggestion of getting rid of items that they've held onto for years. They often say that if they throw something away, they may need it someday when it will be impossible to retrieve.

So they collect scraps of paper with shopping lists from years ago. They may hold on to old clothing, extra furniture, used envelopes, clothing price tags, soda cans, string, leaves, even cigarette ashes, burned-out light bulbs, used tea bags, and toilet paper cores. One woman saved wishbones from chickens because "one day they will be used for making wishes." Another collected clothes that weren't her size because she "might run into someone who needs them someday."