Thoughts on Sat: A WSJ book review on The Hoard Mentality (following) got me to thinking that perhaps there will be an entirely new form of hoarding happening. With our currency being devalued daily, and prices rising on just everything, plus the doom and gloom of more and more taxes, there just may be a whole new phenomenon rising….
Remember the old days of Barter? Well, maybe that is the way we will be going in the future…
WSJ: The Hoard Mentality
When pack-rats go bad: How the urge to accumulate can overwhelm
• BOOKSHELF
• APRIL 30, 2010
By PHILIP TERZIAN
As psychopathologies go, hoarding is relatively new but unquestionably fashionable. E.L. Doctorow published a novel last year ("Homer and Langley") about the Collyer brothers, the Manhattan recluses whose five-story brownstone, in 1947, yielded 170 tons of closely packed objects, including 14 grand pianos and the brothers' corpses. There are two television programs—"Hoarders" (A&E) and "Hoarding: Buried Alive" (TLC)—that introduce viewers to weekly case studies. Now comes "Stuff" by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee, scholars who have studied hoarding closely and pondered its curious causes and disturbing effects.
What is hoarding, exactly? Tune in to either of the TV programs and the scenes are indistinguishable: middle-class residences filled with piles of accumulated things, narrow paths through mountains of junk, obstructed windows, groaning tables, an absence of empty surfaces. There are no authoritative statistics on hoarding in America, but the authors suggest that it is a more widespread phenomenon than is generally realized. There are therapists who deal exclusively with hoarders and specialized cleaning crews with more business than they can handle.
At first glance, it's a comic spectacle: adults who can't throw away empty cans, who keep paper bags full of bric-a-brac and plastic bags full of paper bags— sometimes organizing their hoard by some ambiguous filing system. But the laughter is short-lived. It is evident that hoarders are mentally disturbed and to some degree imprisoned by their impulses. In many cases, they are intelligent, articulate people who can describe at length why it is imperative to hang on to individual objects while acknowledging that hoarding has blighted their existence. The individual accounts of hoarders in "Stuff" are a parade of stifled lives, failed marriages, estranged families, personal agony.
To be sure, hoarding is not a problem in impoverished societies. But it is altogether too easy to blame hoarding on affluence—or, for the politically inclined, on American materialism. Most people, including inveterate collectors of special categories of objects (stamps, baseball cards), confine their instinct to acquire within rational limits. It is arguable, of course, that many of us fall somewhere between pathology and equilibrium, managing our possessions in certain aspects of our lives but losing control in others—in the garage and basement, for example, where some variant of hoarding may afflict the sensible homeowner. In the case of hoarders, whatever cerebral mechanism imposes order and restraint has broken down.
The question is why, and "Stuff," which describes its subject in authoritative detail, has no definitive answer. In the cases presented by the authors there is a common thread of childhood deprivation and adult compensation, but the problem of hoarding reveals itself in infinite ways. Janet and Irene (two of the book's first-name-only case studies) both suffered emotional wounds in youth and exhibit lifelong signs of perfectionism; but while Irene seems to keep everything that passes through her hands, Janet is a compulsive shopper, actively "growing" her collection of stuff. Pamela, another product of a catastrophic upbringing, ends up hoarding animals instead of objects.
Some hoarders live in unimaginable squalor, others in tolerable circumstances. Some are capable of explaining the significance of every trivial object in proximity, including paper clips and scraps of paper; others gaze upon piles of dirty dishes and rotted food and shrug their shoulders. In some cases, possessions seem to serve as a substitute for emotional nourishment or to symbolize a particular memory or desire.
Is hoarding a problem? On the whole, the answer is yes. As a psychiatric matter, it can be destructive to individual lives and disruptive, even dangerous, to other people. In one example, a family of four adults lives in a New York condominium presided over by a hoarder named Daniel, who is both deeply delusional and bullying by nature. The apartment is crawling with cockroaches, and the building is suffused with the odor of decay. Inevitably, it is no easy matter to contend with Daniel through the city bureaucracy or the legal system.
What to do? A viewer of those television shows may well be struck by the gentle approach of the people who seek to help hoarders: Counselors patiently discuss each hoarded/burnt-out light bulb and slowly work their way through metric tons of trash. A measure of tough love seems more desirable to me, along with recognition that hoarding is a symptom of serious illness requiring much more than the talking cure.
—Mr. Terzian, literary editor of The Weekly Standard, is the author of "Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower and the American Century" (Encounter). Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W4
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