What are people hoarding? Compulsive hoarders could be hoarding almost anything, including animals. Compulsive hoarders often accumulate things that most other people wouldn't bother keeping. Hoarders...
Compulsive hoarders often accumulate things that most other people wouldn't bother keeping. Hoarders become emotionally attached to their possessions. They may believe that they need the items that they're holding onto or that they will need the items in the future, even if they never actually use them. They may think the items have some sentimental value, even if other people don't see it. Sometimes the items that hoarders keep are so bizarre that no one, except for the hoarders themselves, can imagine why someone would hang onto them.
Ron Alford, Managing Director of Disaster Masters, a company that specializes in cleaning out apartments that have become "utter disasters", says, "I did a project once for a judge here in New York. The judge's wife stated that they had two apartments and in one they had to knock a hole through a wall. They bought another apartment just to keep all her stuff. She had every kind of toilet paper roll that you can imagine. This is a lawyer/judge. Because she really didn't like being a lawyer/judge, craft work was an escape and she saw these cylindrical cardboard things as the basis of making all kinds of fun things. Then her whole house became a huge fire trap because of this."
"Animal hoarding is also very common," Alford says. You've probably seen stories on the news about people who have a huge number of cats or other animals in their homes, often in an unhealthy condition. It's sometimes very difficult to convince such people to give up their animals. Even if the animals are taken away, and even if the animal hoarders are convicted of a criminal offense, the hoarders often go right back to accumulating more animals as soon as they have the chance. Other hoarders, Alford says, are information junkies, so they hoard newspapers, magazines, books.
At a website called "Understanding Obsessive Compulsive Hoarding", visitors were asked to send in lists of the things that they hoarded. The responses included: broken televisions and small appliances, used tea bags, seed pits, new/used toothbrushes, used fabric softener sheets, toilet paper cores, phone books, the plastic rings that go around soda and milk bottles, and 300 plus clothing patterns ("I never sew").
The Obsessive Compulsive Foundation, a patient advocacy group, writes on its website, Ocfoundation.org, "Some of the things most commonly saved include newspapers, magazines, lists, pens, pencils, empty boxes, pamphlets, old greeting cards, junk mail, old appliances, outdated books, assorted labels, string, rubber bands, plastic containers, bottles, and bottle caps. In the most extreme cases, people have been known to save such things as empty matchbooks, used tissues, old cigarette butts, bird feathers, old cars, discarded paper cups, used aluminum foil, paper towels, lint, and hairs. Some of these sufferers will even rummage through other people's trash, and bring home obvious junk that to them, seems quite useful or repairable."
Some people are compulsive shoppers. They may like to shop at garage sales or on eBay. Their stuff accumulates gradually, until one day they discover that their collections have grown out of control. Some people stock up on things that are, in fact, necessary or useful to have, such as paper towels, but they buy them in such large quantities that they have no place to put them and they end up storing the items somewhere inappropriate, such as in the bathtub. A common type of hoarding involves hanging on to large quantities of newspapers or magazines. In extreme cases, piles of reading material and other papers can take over a home to the point where the only free space consists of narrow passageways that thread between the piles.
