final the trend of hoarders

7/30/2019 Final the Trend of Hoarders

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Christina Hudgins

Professor Presnell

Honors English 1103

November 26th, 2012

The Trend of Hoarders

I grew up in a house that always seemed to have some sort of pile or

organized clutter in every nook and cranny of the rooms. My mom saved and

collected things from coins, which she never let us use for vending machines, to

antique books that were almost illegible and not to be flipped through in fear that

they may fall apart. Her mother also enjoyed collecting, having probably over ten

thousand Barbie dolls (all still in the box) and over seven thousand Christmas

ornaments (she religiously counts each and every one as she places them on the

tree). My father has so many tools and machines in our overstuffed garage that he

says he will fix later and use, which never really happens. When we had to clean

out his mothers house after her death we found boxes and boxes of buttons and

pins, plus all other sorts of nick knacks, sorted into different categories of every

color and size. I also have an uncle who loves Star Wars, having an apartment filled

to the brim with these movies paraphernalia from mugs to life-size, cardboard

cutouts. As my sister and I grew up, we sort of fell into the same trend as our

relatives, collecting all the different types of a certain type of doll, asking for every

category of animal for our stuffed animal collections, and never wanting to let go of


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what we had worked for so many years to collect.

Coming to college and having to leave all my collections at home, I realized

that it was sort of strange to have so much of one almost pointless thing when there

are so many useful and meaningful things I could have in a smaller number and get

by fine. I wondered why my family, in particular, got into a habit of collecting things

over the years and if it was just collecting or hoarding? I did not know very much

about what qualified a person to be a hoarder, other than watching the television

show on TLC, Hoarding: Buried Alive or learning in United States History that after

the Great Depression, people in America started to hold on to their possessions

more carefully, initiating some habits of hoarding. To me, collecting turned into

hoarding when the objects acquired to the person have no personal meaning other

than that person already had a lot of that same object in their possession. However,

after extensive research on what hoarding really was, I found an answer that may

explain why my family and the rest of society truly feel the need to hoard.

Difference Between Hoarding and OCD

When starting my research, I found that there is much controversy over

whether or not to associate compulsive hoarding with obsessive- compulsive

disorders. Sanjaya Saxena, an MD of the Department of Psychiatry at The

University of California at San Diego, wrote about recent studies, which found that

patients with OCD have a different type of abnormal brain activity than those of a

compulsive hoarder. Randy A. Sansone, professor in the Departments of Psychiatry


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and Internal Medicine at Wright State University School of Medicine in Dayton, Ohio,

and Director of Psychiatry Education at Kettering Medical Center in Kettering, Ohio,

found that when the two are linked together, hoarding is viewed more as a

symptom, mostly effective on younger people. This type of hoarding shows a great

fear and indecisiveness of discarding objects along with excessive checking of

objects acquired and organization of hoarded objects to an obsessive degree.

Hoarding in old age is found to be more of a syndrome, giving the hoarder

pleasure with each new acquisition of objects and only discomfort when they are

forced to discard their possessions, a different case entirely from OCD patients who

have constant distress and anxiety over their disease or due to their disease. This

brings about the question of if these people are just collecting, not

hoarding? Sansone wrote that collectors organize and collect specific objects that

have a value to them and other collectors, while hoarders keep things that have little

to no significance in an enormous volume. What, then, is really known about

compulsive hoarding?

Studies of Hoarding

My investigation was, thus, led to what studies have actually been done on

this subject. According to Randy A. Frost, professor of psychology at Smith College

in Northampton, Maryland, hoarding has been brought to the spotlight for the public

since as early as the 1800s. In the 1950s, hoarding was presented as real issue from

an article written in a New York City newspaper and continues to be uncovered to

society to this day. In 1980, hoarding was officially associated with obsessive-


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compulsive hoarder. It is debatable whether or not compulsive hoarding really

needs treatment via drugs or if mental stimulation is sufficient enough. Melinda

Beck, columnist of the Health section of the Wall Street Journal, wrote that family

members should not force their relatives to give away their belongings against their

will, but to try and guide them in the right direction. It may be that a decision can be

reached on keeping a certain number of an item, for example 100 dolls rather than

500, or slowly donating items to an organization or group of people that the hoarder

cares for and to which the hoarder will feel good helping.

Melinda Beck gives a great example of how one family members hoarding

ruined the entire clans life, especially the daughter. She quotes the daughter, Liz,

who said, To this day, I will not clip coupons- my mother used to save entire

newspapers for them- and if I havent worn something in a year or so, I throw it

out. Liz grew up having to make up excuses to guests of her house as to why there

were piles and piles of clutter forever present from room to room. Lizs mother was

a compulsive hoarder, keeping things from newspapers to used paper towels. As an

adult, Liz considers her experience with her mothers hoarding a form of child

abuse. She now has a fear of falling into the same trend as her mother, who still

hoards at the age of eighty in a retirement home.

It is the responsibility of the of the loved ones to find the best way to help

their hoarder come back into a healthy lifestyle and to what extreme they should

take to do so. If the hoarder places their own lives or the lives of others at risk, this

may mean going to the courts to resolve the issue and, in extreme cases, seek to


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become the guardian of the loved one as to resolve this issue. Any way one chooses

to resolve this sickness may be expensive and most hoarders are hesitant to

participate in the treatment or stops before they are cured. With so much debate

and difficulty in finding a way to define and treat this issue in the first place, I

wanted to know the factors that made a person hoard.

Why Do They Do It?

There are many reasons as to why a person may begin to compulsively

hoard. Saxena found that this trait is past down from generation to generation in

families, with compulsive hoarders having at least one relative that they consider to

be a pack rat. Though the hoarding factor is strongly familial, its phenotype is

genetically discrete to most families. Compulsive hoarding is a cranial dysfunction

having to do with a persons ability to make decisions efficiently. Therefore, brain

lesions resulting in damage to the orbitofrontal cortex, medial prefrontal cortex,

anterior cingulate cortex, or frontal poles can also be a contributing factor as to why

someone would hoard, these regions of the brain being used in decision-making

processes. Saxena emphasized the correlation between indecisiveness and

compulsive hoarding is shown, through this association with decision-making

regions of the brain damaged contributing to hoarding, to be a prime concept that

must be considered in reasoning why someone hoards. Hoarders find pleasure in

the acquisition of a new treasure to add to their possessions, keeping them


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wanting more and more, continuing their hoarding. Marsha Richins, distinguished

professor of marketing in the Trulaske College of Business at the University of

Missouri, illustrated how the more hoarders acquire these often worthless items,

the less they have satisfaction in what they have, leaving them wanting more. Are

these people trying to fill a void that is not meant to be satisfied with material

objects? This led me into an exploration of materialism and how it might be the real

answer as to why hoarding occurs.

Hoarding and Materialism

Richins defines materialism as the value that a person gives to certain

physical objects, whether it is wealth or possessions. Studies have shown that

people with a more materialistic outlook on life become more and more dissatisfied

with each new purchase they obtain, always knowing that there are more, better

products out there. In turn, they also become dissatisfied by their own lives, judging

themselves only by their possessions, not their true identities. On the other hand,

less materialistic people have a more positive outlook on life, appreciating what

they have and how they got it. As our world is becoming increasingly consumer

focused, materialism has been drilled into the minds of people from an early

age. Ever since I began kindergarten, there has always been something for my

classmates and I to have to be considered cool from beanie babies to the iPhone

5. The mass production of hundreds of very similar toys, all needing to be

collected to be accepted by peers in society whether it is Barbie dolls for children


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to the latest Apple product for adults has led to this problem. Technological

advances make it easier than ever to acquire these material things in enormous

quantities via eBay or other online shopping sites at prices that are met by many

extreme buyers. It seems that as people acquire more stuff, they lose sight of the

non material things in their lives, the real relationships they could have with people

who can love them back. Families do not sit down together for dinner as often,

texting has made conversations as extremely impersonal as possible, games and

shopping constantly through the multitude of outlets available give people reason

not to spent time with others.

Is materialism slowly taking the place of companionship in society

today? And is this focus of materialism slowly making compulsive hoarding a more

common trait or even a trend for the society of the future? I feel that if our media

promoted ways to appreciate what one already has and how to use their own

possessions to its fullest capacity rather than leaving the public dissatisfied with

their lives on account of their possessions or lack thereof would ultimately lessen

the possibility of a hoarding epidemic in society. However, the consumer focus of

most of the globe gives this hope very little promise. If people could take time to

really realize and appreciation how much they really have and how much more

satisfaction they can have by living out their lives with others rather than with

unfeeling objects, maybe compulsive hoarding could become a thing of the past.


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What Does This All Mean?

Frost shares his own interpretation of hoarding in his article with this

quote from The Inferno by Dante Alighieri in J. Ciardi :

Here, too, I saw a nation of lost souls,

far more than were above: they strained their

chests against enormous weights, and with mad howls

rolled them at one another. Then in haste

they rolled them back, one party shouting out:

Why do you hoard? and the other: Why do you waste?

Hoarding and squandering wasted all their light

and brought them screaming to this brawl of wraiths.

You need no words of mine to grasp their plight.

Now, hoarding may not bring people to this level of misery in the world

today, but it does suffocate people from the true meanings of their lives. Human

nature tells us to always take as much as we can, even at the cost of hurting

relationships or, worst, hurting ourselves.

What I have discovered through this study of hoarding is that people can

get so lost and caught up in the world around them, feeling that they need physical

objects to hold on to that they can know for certain will always be there to have a

grasp on reality. The more they have, the more comfortable they feel, thinking these

things give their lives value. However, my grandmothers doll collection doesnt


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make her any better of a person than if she had never owned a doll in her life. My

uncle can collect as many pieces of Star Wars merchandise as he can fit in his house,

but that doesnt mean that he will be more loved than if he had less. Things do

not necessarily give a life value, it is the real relationships and interactions with

others that make up ones life.

Everyone, whether they are compulsive hoarders or not, should step back

and look at how they measure the worth of their lives: is it how much they own or

how they impact on other, real people? Compulsive hoarding is a blinding condition

to the hoarder, not being able to see how great their lives can be with all their

treasures piled too high. With this new understanding of hoarding and materialism

in general, I hope to help my own family see that their collections and material

things do not define their lives, but their love towards others and each other make

their lives priceless.


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Works Cited

Beck , Melinda. "When Hoarding Makes Life Miserable for Others. Wall Street

Journal. 9 November 2009. Web. 30 Oct. 2012.

Frost, Randy A. "From Dante to DSM-V: A Short History of Hoarding." International

OCD Foundation. International OCD Foundation-Hoarding Center, 2010

Web. 30 Oct 2012.

Richins, Marsha. "The Positive and Negative Consequences of Materialism: What Are

They and When Do They Occur?"Advances in Consumer Research.

University of Missouri, 2004 Web. 4 Nov 2012.

Saxena, Sanjaya. "Recent Advances in Compulsive Hoarding." Children of Hoarders.

Current Medicine Group LLC, 2008. Web. 30 Oct 2012.

United States. National Center for Biotechnology Information. Hoarding: Obsessive

Symptom or Syndrome?. By Randy A. Sansone. U.S.National Library of

Medicine, Matrix Medical Communications, 2010. Web. 29 Oct 2012.

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