Why Do Hoarders Accumulate Stuff?

Compulsive hoarders are people who accumulate way too much stuff and are unable to throw away things that are no longer of use.

Daniel is an extreme case of an compulsive hoarder was described in Discover magazine special 2010 Brain issue. When a social worker came to Daniel's apartment with an court-ordered cleaning crew, the apartment had no visible floor. The floor was covered with dirty paper, food wrappers, rags, and smelly clothes which attracted a multitude of cockroaches. As I'm writing this, I'm trying to put the words mildly to avoid offending the sense of the readers. But if you want all the graphic details, you can find it in the above link. An excerpt from the article describes it as "one solid wall of trash 20 feet deep".^[1]

It is clear that the condition of the apartment is un-livable. That is why the court had ordered a cleaning crew. However, one month after the cleaning, the apartment went back to the horrible condition as before, attesting to the fact that compulsive hoarders is unable to stop their behavior.

Many times, hoarding is a form of obsessive compulsive behavior. About 30% to 40% of obsessive compulsive disorder patients display hoarding behavior. The American Journal of Psychiatry says "Compulsive hoarding is most commonly driven by obsessional fears of losing important items that the patient believes will be needed later, distorted beliefs about the importance of possessions, excessive acquisition, and exaggerated emotional attachments to possessions." ^[3]

Some studies show that hoarding behavior sometimes runs in families. This may be due to modeling behavior or it may be genetic. Johns Hopkins University had looked to a region on chromosome 14 as a possible genetic marker. Dr. David Tolin reminds us that just because a person has a genetic disposition to a behavior, it does not necessarily mean that it will happen. ^[4]

Brain scans shows lower metabolic rates in the anterior cingulate cortex of the brain of hoarders. Some people who have damage to their right mesial prefrontal cortex become compulsive hoarders. Hoarding is a primal drive. However, it is the right mesial prefrontal cortex that keeps this drive in check by distinguishing what things are of value and what things are not. ^[2]

Obsessive hoarding is a real disorder and its sufferers really can not stop what they are doing. 50% of its sufferers also have depression which is brought on by this disorder.

There is a proposal by the DSM working group to include "Hoarding Disorder" into the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).^[5]

The National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization (NGSCD) has a "NGSCD Clutter Hording Scale" that ranges from Level I Horder to Level V Horder. Level I (one) where household is considered normal. And Level V (five) is when a professional team needs to be assembled in order to help the sufferer.

National Public Radio's Science Friday episode of May 14, 2010 talked about the psychology of compulsive hoarding with Randy O Frost, author of Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things. He says that somewhere between to 3 to 5 percent of population may have hoarding behavior (which is a much larger number than what people think). Randy Frost also talked briefly about treatment and a resource where people can get help at the International OCD Foundation.(OCD stands for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder)

The Science Friday interview with Frost tells of several stories which highlights the tragic circumstances of this condition. One example mentioned was that of the Collyer brothers^[6] -- which is now a well known case of compulsive hoarding that there is an entry in Wikipedia. The Collyer brothers lived in a brownstone at Fifth and 128th in Manhattan New York in the early 1900's. They accumulated 130 tons of waste collected over several decades and had even set booby traps to protect against intruders and perhaps to protect their "stuff". Ironically, Langley (one of the brothers) was crushed by his own booby trap while crawling through a newspaper tunnel to bring food to his brother Homer. Without food, Homer who was blind and handicapped by rheumatism, later starved to death.