What are the symptoms of compulsive hoarding? There is a correlation between intelligence and compulsive hoarding. Most hoarders are highly intelligent and competent at work, but are chronically disorganized and living in massive amounts of clutter at home.
Compulsive hoarders accumulate things in their homes that other people might not consider worth saving or stockpiling. In addition, hoarding is considered compulsive when there is so much clutter that it interferes with the normal use of a hoarder's home. For example, some hoarders might store so much stuff on their beds that they are unable to sleep there and have to sleep on the couch instead. Other hoarders may be unable to use their stoves or ovens, or may be unable to enter some rooms, or in extreme cases may not be able to use any part of their house at all. Also, hoarding is considered compulsive when hoarders feel significant distress about their clutter.
Compulsive hoarders may be impaired, but that doesn't mean they are less intelligent. In fact, just the opposite is true. Compulsive hoarders are often exceptionally intelligent. Ron Alford, Managing Director of Disaster Masters, a company that specializes in cleaning out apartments that have become "utter disasters", thinks that there is a correlation between intelligence and hoarding. He says that hoarders "are really, really smart, but they just never learned how to manage the amount of stuff they have".
"In some cases," Alford says, "people develop a learned helplessness because they know that their spouse or significant other or roommate is going to come along and clean up behind them. These people can learn to put things away, but they are thinking about what they are going to do next, not what they should have been doing a minute ago. Everything that they look at, they leave, so that they have a trail. I believe that many people have clutter and collect stuff as a testament to their lives - as a way of saying, 'I was here. These are my trophies, this is my graduation picture, that's the little thing that I wore on graduation day, this is the picture of such and such, and that's my dog.' Sometimes these people's lives are really lousy and they become self-imprisoned, so they start hoarding."
"The solution," Alford says, "is to get these people to change how they think. They tend to think that they just are the way they are. It's like smoking. Some of the people who are dyed-in-the-wool smokers think they are smokers and therefore they are. That sounds so profound and yet so silly. But the minute people start thinking that they are not chronically disorganized, and that they need help because they are overwhelmed, they figure it out, and they find us, and we get them out of the mess in two ways."
"One way," Alford says, "is that we physically go in and do the work because these people are not capable of doing it. In some cases their clutter has gone on for so long that it may take a crew of five, six, seven, or eight people about four, five, or six days to undo what has been going on for ten, twenty, or thirty years. They just accumulate clutter until such time that they either volunteer or are forced by some outside relative, a landlord, or a government or social agency to change their behavior."
"The good news," Alford says, "is that with the Internet and with more publicity on the topic of compulsive hoarding, more hoarders are starting to realize that they don't need to be ashamed anymore, that there are people out there who understand the abnormality. If you had cancer, there would be no reason to feel ashamed about it. But sometimes people just don't know how to take care of themselves. They don't know how to even think about taking care of themselves, so therefore they don't."
