I find the comments in this thread to be counterproductive (bordering on disturbing/dangerous). Trivializing/dismissing the existence of mental disorders based on uninformed viewpoints can cause harm to others, in that they can feel ostracized and become less likely to seek the help they need. Comments like this are along the same lines as 'everybody gets depressed--you just have to choose to be happy'. Depression is a frequently a severe and life-altering disease, and I hope everyone can recognize this sort of statement as absurd.
Similarly, hoarding (as described in the article) is a cluster of persistent behaviors distinct from related disorders (like OCD). Like any cluster (esp. clusters in a high-dimensional space, like human behavior), the class membership is inherently fuzzy--everyone exists somewhere on the hoarding spectrum or OCD spectrum or ADD spectrum. But by definition very few (~6%, according to the link) people are close enough to the far side of the spectrum that it causes severe distress to themselves and others. Think of it (very loosely) like cancer--virtually everyone has some cancer cells in their body, but our protective systems are usually able to keep them in check before they run amok. But once they do, it undeniably becomes cancer.
I don't really know how to say this in a better way, but trivializing or denying the existence of mental illness is cruel and reductive, and these sorts of attitudes tend to ricochet around. Please don't participate in doing so.
Couple of things. All it means being classified in the DSM is "now we can diagnose and bill for treatment."
Another, many commenters here are saying "Hur de hur, I have a lot of stuff, I'm such a hoarder." I have to think they have not experienced hoarding. My wife's mom is a hoarder. Literal trash fills her home and she navigates through unsafe tunnels of newspaper, disguarded food, broken things she has a pulled from dumpsters, and animal feces between her couch and the restroom. She gets distressed at the thought of removing any of it. She might do something with that broken or rotten thing one day, and not in the hack something together way.
Collectors, reusers/repurposers, and keeping things that can be legitimately used again are not hoarders. If the DSM definition includes them, it is only due to overly broad definitions to make billing for treatment easier. Take the definition of ADD; nearly every kid can fall into that definition when doing a homework assignment they don't like.
I tend to feel guilty throwing away stuff that can't be recycled (and even recyclable stuff, knowing that recycle recovery is nowhere close to 100%). As a result, I often end up hoarding stuff that I wish I didn't have, before finally getting fed up and just clearing out a bunch of stuff by throwing it away. As the article mentions regarding perfectionism, I have to be fed up enough that I'll just quickly throw away stuff instead of second guessing whether I might be wasting material that I might have a chance of finding a use for.
This is exacerbated by the fact that there is lots more to hoard today (massive amounts of junk mail, swag at every event, and product packaging getting ever fancier). I think akin to how many people suffer from a paradox of choice, I suffer from a paradox of abundance, and actually sort of wish goods and materials were scarce enough that you could put time and effort into making the most of what you have without getting overwhelmed.
The article mentions something in passing that I think is important:
Potential and Value
The article only mentions it once. We live in an increasingly globalized world where our individuality can have an ever smaller impact on the enormous system. I think this drives a lot of people to have a feeling that they are living up to less than their potential and their value isn't that high. Maybe the whole system is living up to less than it's potential. But there is a lot of hopelessness about being able to influence it and our value within the system.
The reality is that much of what is horded has potential or is tied to something that had/has (like lost relatives mentioned in the article)
It seems like hording, like compulsive behaviors, allow us to create a small sense of agency in a world that constantly strips us of it and define potential and value by our own book.
I hoard digital media. I have thousands of e-books, movies, TV episodes, music, and games that I will never be able to consume in my lifetime. Not to mention all the time I spent obtaining the media. It does make me slightly uncomfortable to get rid of the ones I know I probably won't consume, but that feeling is mitigated by the fact that I should be able to easily re-obtain the items if I change my mind.
I don't know if this is related to physical hoarding, since I am an anti-hoarder when it comes to physical objects -- I prefer to have fewer things as opposed to more things, and have a strong aversion to what I call "cheap plastic crap".
The only people I know who have profoundly cluttered homes filled with much more stuff than average had war or famine/poverty as a part of their personal history.
I'm sure this doesn't account for all cases and my sample isn't representative.
When I notice the extra items in the homes of hoarders I know, they're nothing that I haven't or wouldn't have acquired in one way or another -- they're things I would've thrown away.
I see no evidence in the article that a possible increase in (more likely recognition of) hoarding is a result of increased consumption and yet that connection is implied in the article again and again.
My mom is almost entirely unable to throw things away. As a consequence, my parents have boxes and boxes of all kinds of stuff stored, including some of my toys from 20+ years ago. They live in a rather big house, but it is starting to encroach on their living space, and it does prevent them from using some of their extra rooms for their original intent, such as a dedicated washing room, so they could move the washer/dryer out of their downstairs bathroom.
Every time my dad and I try to bring up the subject of clearing all of that stuff away, she counters with claims like "but that's our winter clothes" or "as soon as I have the time", which never happens.
I've talked to her about why she tends to accumulate stuff like that, and she thinks it's because her family didn't have much when she was growing up, and her mother was a semi-functioning alcoholic. She says they often experienced simply running out of basic things, and couldn't immediately afford to replace it. So she internalized a need to keep everything around, never throw out or give away anything that still works, and always have at least one spare in storage.
They have three refrigerators (for three adults, my sister still lives at home), which are all stuffed full at all times. This leads to ~monthly rituals of cleaning out all the spoiled food, and then filling up the fridges again to repeat the cycle. When questioned on this behavior, my mom argues that they need to keep all the different spreads and stuff around at all times, because you never know what people might want to eat. We try to argue that it's perfectly OK to not have every single food you would possibly like to eat at any time available at all times, but she doesn't seem to want to agree.
I'm clearly a hoarder. As a child, I collected WWII stuff. Some, I found myself in battlefields. And some, I got through trade with other kids. And a lot of it got disassembled. Both out of curiosity, and for parts. So I had quite the collection. Basically, weapons, ordinance, hardware and electronics.
And now, I just keep broken stuff, or parts of it. Just about every display, for example, comes with a power cord (or now, brick) and data cable. Ditto with computers and keyboards. So I keep the best ~five of each that aren't in use, and donate the rest to a reuse center. I also have quite the fan collection. But I no longer save RAM, because it so rarely matches.
I also have lots of hardware. Metal stock, fasteners, etc. And scrap wood, left over from projects.
Sure, it takes up space. But I have a closet for that, and it's reasonably well organized. And if something breaks, or if I need to hack something, there's a pretty good chance that I'll have what I need.
I think the simplest explanation goes like this:
1. Hoarding is addictive behavior. 2. The Opposite of Addiction is Connection (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/love-and-sex-in-the-...) 3. Because we currently have less connection, we have more addiction—and hoarding is one instantiation.
Granted this is a layman's perspective, but it doesn't seem like much of a mystery to me.
On the one hand we have rampant marketing pushing the idea that stuff will make us happy, and on the other we have society telling us that waste is dooming the planet.
So we have significant pressures to a) acquire things and b) not throw them out.
My parents grew up in the Great Depression. My dad still hoards stuff, because he remembers when you simply couldn't get stuff. For example, he talks about re-using thread, not because they had no money to buy thread, but because there was no thread to buy because the thread factories had closed.
I wonder if the Great Recession had a similar impact on people. Staring the ruin of the financial world in the face may have left a mark on some people.
Minimalism is the ideology of the rich - you don’t need to keep stuff if you know you can simply buy it again next-day shipping. Keeping stuff “in case” it’s ever needed again is the normal behaviour of normal people!
My untested hypothesis is that hoarding is a symptom of depression. That coupled with there are just "more things" to hoard these days.
I think there's just been a general decline in mental health. The suicide rate has been increasing steadily since 2000.
Hoarding feels similar to over eating.
We need to eat but some people can't control the quality or quantity of food consumed.
Similarly, instead of collecting an appropriate amount of valuable and useful resources, they collect random nearly useless items and attach much value to them.
Could be a case of an ancient survival strategy that is no longer valid in the current environment.
I have a family member who has mild hoarding habits and the most striking thing is the emotional attachment to the stuff. Throwing out something is felt as though it is a personal attack and a loss almost equivalent to tossing the family pet.
To blame income, capitalism, live space, etc misses the point. The items don't have to be large or important. The space doesn't have to be large. The income doesn't have to plentiful.
If there is an increase in hoarding, it's probably due to an increase in stress and anxiety in life.
Funny enough, in the past days I was thinking about hoarding as a neurological disorder. It has similarities to keeping a lot of things in mind at the same time and re-iterate them over and over. The are quite a few mind-hoarders, as I call them, who basically hoard ideas and concepts to the point that they forget what is actually relevant here and now. Hoarding psychical objects might stem from the same cause inside the brain which causes the mind hoarding as well. Hence it can't be a psychological disorder alone.
This is an epic talk on the psychology of clutter by a very subtly brilliant therapist. [0] I re-listen every few months and get new things out of it every time. Many of her points are in this article, but also many more and more deeply and personally contextualized.
The article mentions divorce. I would say that you can be a hoarder but live with people that help you balance against hoarding. Beyond your partner, this is also true if you don't have a social life or don't live with other people. So, nowadays degrading social life (e.g. mobile phone addiction) could be a natural cause.
The bit about hoarding not existing in the past except for gold was a real eye-roller. Stuff was expensive then so it wouldn't be abnormal and more readily pawnable. You could sell anything from old clothes to a dead horse or headless axe and get something of value from it. Virtually nothing was worthless.
No one's mentioned marketing? We're probably bombarded with more marketing than we ever have before. In addition, it's so easy to buy stuff with 1-click shopping with 2-day shipping.
It's known that web sites want to be addictive for people, but it's so they can ultimately sell people something.
I'm not a hoarder; I just see the potential for a future use that I don't quite know of for these cardboard boxes and paper rolls. Never know when you'll need a lot of cardboard ...
I accept that it can be a disorder, but they don't say whether hoarding (or, 'organising' I think is more accurate) is just a natural human compulsion. From early childhood we seem to be drawn to collectible/hoardable/organisable items (baseball cards, Pogs, Pokémon, Barbies, etc). Maybe this hoarding disorder is a poor manifestation of a compulsion that we all exhibit in some way.
This describes the hoarders that I have actually known:
"But researchers have found a possible link between hoarding and PTSD among Holocaust survivors, and late-onset hoarding has often been linked to loss or trauma."
Of those I've known, all of them have had intense anxiety about their own mortality -- all of us have some anxiety about our death, but with hoarders that fear is close to the surface. I've had the impression that they hope to hold onto the past by holding onto physical objects from the past. If you keep a souvenir from a particular day, then it's as if that day has not yet ended, it will last forever.
I think there are multiple root causes which are society-wide.
One, is that the boomers were a post WWII generation and there was a huge need to keep everything, because people lost everything and much of it was unreplaceable: My parents were teenagers in London during the blitz and lost book collections, possessions being bombed out. They subsequently had kids, across the boomer window: Guess what culture we grew up in: a hoarder culture.
We experienced the 1970s oil crisis. So we kept candles and suger. We experienced periodic food and supply shortages. So we kept bulk buying.
We kept paper. We kept things. We kept old cars. We kept old electrical items. We repurposed them.
But then consumer society moved to replace, not repair. The problem is we didn't get our brains re-wired.
The other societal pressure is affluenza. We're under a huge amount of social pressure to keep buying stuff. If the rate of acquisition exceeds the rate of consumption, you can wind up accidentally in hoarder mode, stacked up with purchases "just in case"
Thirdly, social anxiety levels are skyrocketing, especially amongst the young. Anxiety feeds hoarding, because the pleasure moment in getting things is matched by the pain moment in shedding things. Its a cycle of emotional states feeding a buy-keep mode.
Fourthly, we're drowning in choice. Its a classic experiment, to offer three jams for breakfast, or twenty (if you offer twenty, people often avoid jam because deciding which is too hard). If you have too many choices, you wind up making bad choices to get "all the things" to avoid having to decide which to get. So you get two kinds of screws from the wall of twenty, or a box of twenty kinds? I went the twenty. Then, we have the choice problem disposing: which to keep and which to chuck?
Fifthly, the "dont be wasteful" moment works to stop buying but if you HAVE the thing, "dont be wasteful" says don't dispose of it. Dont "throw things away which are useful"
Disposal stores, Op-Shops, Charity shops, don't take electrical goods any more in OZ (safety risk) and don't take shoes and bedding (health risk) so these things stack up because adding them to the waste pile is "wasteful"
Society is hard sometimes. Its judgemental, and it adds pressures. These pressures feed hoarding.
Marie Kondo may be helping unwind it, but the back pressure is huge. She is a bit cult-y and maybe others have noticed what I see: people are disrespecting cleaning up, cutting down, going to 'wasteful' and 'disposable society' messages. Yes, its wasteful to buy unwanted things, and throw them away.
But we have the things, and if we stop buying the economy tanks.
What do we do?
Consumerism pops into my mind. People want more and more and at the same time are terrible at getting rid of things
Is the inverse of this extreme minimalism?
And how can hoarders actually be helped?
The psychological industry inventing new disorders and diagnosing normal human behaviors as a disorder, something that needs to be fixed.
https://www.ted.com/talks/jon_ronson_strange_answers_to_the_...
>What’s Causing the Rise of Hoarding Disorder?
Judging by the article taking something that's gone for ages without too many problems and recategorising it as a disorder.
Why is this page using 100% of CPU?
The unstated premise is that there is a rise in hoarding and that hoarding is a disorder. As this very article states at the beginning it was only within the last 5 years that it has been recognized as a psychological disorder. It's just as likely to be removed again depending on the profits, or not, of those seeking to exploit the idea of hoarding being a disorder.
Brexit.
Ultimately, it comes down to a lack of sexual intercourse. When one is sexually deprived, they will attempt to substitute sexual activity with something: whether it is accumulating goods, or overeating for example.
The only people I know who have profoundly cluttered homes filled with much more stuff than average had war or famine/poverty as a part of their personal history.
I'm sure this doesn't account for all cases and my sample isn't representative.
When I notice the extra items in the homes of hoarders I know, they're nothing that I haven't or wouldn't have acquired in one way or another -- they're things I would've thrown away.
I see no evidence in the article that a possible increase in (more likely recognition of) hoarding is a result of increased consumption and yet that connection is implied in the article again and again.
Consumer capitalism caused by an infinitely exponential increase in advertising compared to any other era of human history.
For me, it was growing up with Sonic the hedgehog. I was trained that keeping as many rings as I could would ensure my survival.
It's a Symptome of schizophrenia. Not everyone with it runs around as hobo rambling. Instead you have plans, a myriad of them, and each item you got is justified by its usage by the recombination disease.
More disposable income and larger living space.
Smaller living space means that you can't save the thing you will need once every five year anymore. A previously adaptive behavior becomes poorly adaptive.
Cheap disposable items. Where before you would have a few hand made item of high quality, you now get a lot of lower quality items. This is partially related to technological advancement. If things become obsolete fast, it doesn't make sense to build with quality. Anyway a consequence is that it's easier to acquire a large amount of stuff than before.
Anti-landfill propaganda. We are guilt-tripped for throwing stuff in the garbage. We are told to dispose of things in very complicated ways and then it may be easier to just not dispose of it.
Breakdown of community and family. Before we might keep things around by giving them away to relatives or friends. There is a satisfaction in passing the torch. But this option isn't as available anymore.