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Harmless Pack Rat or Compulsive Hoarder?
For most people, the junk mail that clogs the mailbox and piles up around the house is simply an annoyance -- something to go through and trash when time permits.
For Paula Kotakis of San Francisco, however, every scrap of mail -- from advertising circulars to election booklets debating the latest political initiatives -- represents potentially valuable information too precious to discard.
Her compulsion to hang on to all that information began in college and eventually took its toll. "I had five-foot-high stacks of newspapers in the living room that were decades old," says Kotakis, 49, who works as a night guard at a fine arts museum in the city. "I had every bit of election material. I kept all my school notes, every single college notebook." Loved ones who lived with her -- including her husband and her father -- were frustrated. Still, she couldn't bear to clean the clutter.
Most of us hold on to things we don't need -- stacks of old magazines we think we'll read someday, piles of receipts we never find time to clean out, a favorite shirt or dress we hope will come back into style.
So how do you know when your "collecting" or being a "harmless pack rat" becomes "hoarding" and is interfering with your life, your job, and your relationships?
( Are you a hoarder? Find out what our expert, Patricia Farrell, PhD thinks and leave a comment on her WebMD Blog.)
Here are three questions to answer honestly to see if you've crossed the line, and what to do if you have.
1. Do you like the feeling of acquiring things -- no matter if they are expensive or free -- and do you have difficulty discarding objects no longer of use to you, objects that others may throw away easily?
Hoarders love to acquire things, says Randy Frost, PhD, Israel professor of psychology at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., and a veteran researcher on hoarding. Whether they buy the objects or get them for free doesn't typically matter, he says; all objects are treasured.
The objects may appear to have limited or no value to others, adds Sanjaya Saxena, MD, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine in La Jolla, another expert on hoarding behavior. For instance, a hoarder may have newspaper clippings from decades ago that don't involve them or anyone they know; yet they hesitate to discard them because they feel they may need them someday, or someone else might.
The reasons hoarders give for needing to hold on to the materials vary, Frost says. "It might include being sentimentally attached or having a sense that the article has utility and you don't want to waste it."
2. Are your living or working spaces so cluttered that it's difficult to find things or to use the spaces for their intended purposes?
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