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Hoarding

Hoarding

Some humans may find themselves with the title of 'Hoarder' where they are known to be caught with huge number of unorganized items within their surroundings. These humans may not use these items, but they are collected and stored or placed within their path for no purpose at all. Do you feel Hoarding is part of some kind of human psychosis, an illness of the mind or simple greed?

Hoarding

This is a definite psychological problem. I have seen people do this for years. They surround themselves with things like a matter of security. I am all the opposite - I like to see a clear place and have little to worry about, because if I am surrounded by things I cannot think. In the case of a Hoarder they are all the opposite, they cannot think if they do not have things on top, around and below their feet.

Hoarding Health & Special Psychology

Name: Jim

Comments: On A&E they feature people who have a seriously bad hoarding problem. There was this one woman who had rotten food all over her home. She would just buy food and instead of eating it will just leave it everywhere in the house until it rotted. She believed that her problem started when she was impoverished and she had no choice in the kind of food she could have. When she did get money she started hoarding everything and felt guilty of getting rid of it.

Hoarding

What hurts me is the children involved in these cases, they often pickup their hoarding habit and then cannot take the emotional impact of seeing their stuff thrown away when intervention is necessary.

Hoarding

While I've seen worse examples, my family and myself to an extent, fit this disorder. Mostly though we have no specific thing we obsessively collect, but a few different things that we jut tend to let overflow to a noticeable extent. I like containers and office supplies, boxes, tubs, totes, plastic sacks, etc. I have more than I can use, though I still have a ton of just "clutter" on shelves and smushed into an overhead in a closet, etc. In fact I have a "storage room" in my little trailer I'm in, that just has "stuff" in it, where I can go to get stuff when I'm working on some lamebrained project - but still have other stuff here and there around the house, mostly papers.

My family members are similar in their houses, with that overly cozy sense of things all piled up and around into a sort of embryonic space - you can move through it and such, it is usually well kept, but there are no bare walls, shelves or surfaces that aren't holding half a dozen things, whatever they might be. I feel we have more stuff than we have comfortable room for, in a lot of our cases, but there's still an issue at work, still go to garage sales and such while there are still boxes of junk piled up in their own, etc.

I have another friend who probably qualifies more to this subject - he doesn't really "clutter" his trailer the way most would expect; his is full of old computers. He is really into the old Apple IIe and similar computers, and collecting the super rare internal cards that can sell for hundreds of dollars each on ebay, and so he has incalculable piles and boxes full of parts, disks, books, etc. He had six shelves and three tables in his kitchen overflowing with diodes and wires and Heathkit HERO robot parts and Apple cases, and his bedroom/living room is just as piled with smaller cards and gadgets and circuitry he can work on while watching a movie. He started cleaning the other day and I helped him carry stuff out of his house to a storage building, and while we didn't get it all, I myself carried 9 large plastic Rubbermade tubs, full of just computer stuff, 7 robots (some complete, some not) and still yet more books and manuals and boxes of software and blank 5.25" disks - in the storage room that he had already put stuff in were easily 30 Apple II and IIe computers, stacked on top of each other like he was building a monument.

To me, this last example most seems like the hoarder mentality you read about.

Hoarding

I appreciate you sharing a bit of your world. Are the thing you keep actually things you use or you just have them in case you may need them? If you have a lot of one item at home that you do not use do you tend to keep getting that same item?

I know a relative that has a lot of stuff and they are all over. In some cases rather than get rid of it they pay a storage to keep it. It makes no sense at all since the items are worth less than what she is paying for the storage to keep it. The other patter she has is to keep everything in bags if there is no particular place to keep them.

Now I can understand if someone has a keenness to keep stuff, what I do not understand is why does it have to be chaotic or messy or even down right disgusting in the case of the woman in the show that had rotten food everywhere in her home?

Hoarding

Bit late on this one, guess I forgot about it, but I think it's a good question.

For me it's a mixture of both, but not by design. I *think* I use most or all of it, or will need it very soon, but never get around to doing whatever it is I was planning to do, so it just sits there. I was going to do numerology from a book I have, to demonstrate something to people on the net, but lost the incentive, so the book is just lying there still on the edge of a cabinet, months after I'd lost interest in it.

A lot are things I do use or potentially dig through every so often, mostly pens, pencils, office supplies, electronics, paper, etc. I'm "clerically-inclined", but I've been trying to keep things in boxes and plastic tubs, and have managed to get a few good stacks. It's not actually getting RID of things, but it IS organizing some, reducing clutter - but clutter isn't necessarily hoarding.

I have some sentimental things, which I think are okay to keep, a stuffed animal a girl from the net sent me, but also boxes of books that I don't know what to do with, boxes of VCR tapes, dice, knick-knacks, dead plants, etc. It's so hard to divide things from clutter to sensible keepables.

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Hoarding Psychology Special & Health

Hoarder admits to problem, gets help cleaning house

For hours Thursday morning, volunteer workers wearing face masks and gloves cleaned the house where Judy Bassett was born and has lived for most of her 60 years. Ref. Source 7