Mental Health Association of San Francisco
Institute on Compulsive Hoarding and Cluttering

Is seeking a part-time Program Coordinator.  For more details, please visit: MHA-SF Position.

Yes folks, we even post job openings here! (If they have to do with Compulsive Hoarding, that is). -childrenofhoarders.com

70 Photographs from 1947 of the Collyer Brothers mansion, the famous reclusive Hoarders in New York. 

Type "Homer Collyer" in search box after clicking on link.

What's Left Behind.
Family Members of the Collyer Brothers.

Scheduled to start in April 2007 is a 24 hour Hotline through the Department of Mental Health in Los Angeles County for resources for Hoarders/Family...
Check our back here for updates as we learn of them!

An interesting blog with photos from someone helping a COH...here.

Quotes:
"I’m helping an old friend clean out her “family house”. Her mom died six months ago and was afflicted with a compulsion commonly known as “hoarding”. "

"Mrs. R. was certainly expressing herself and defining her self-image through the types of things she stuffed into every corner. Mrs. R., an ivy league educated woman with a minor in art history hoarded a certain aesthetic. The hoarding compulsion formed a kind of text about who she was. There is a semiotic nature to the “museum” of this tangled and compressed “collection”. "

***
Continuation of blog:  About people who want to "come in and gawk" during the excavation of the house

"A little tension was building when he added, "I just wanted to check it out." He felt no need for politeness or compassion and he was tipping against civility. There was no concern for me as a friend of this poor dead lady. For him there was only the desire to enter a long anticipated freak show."

"I felt the shame and protectiveness that children of hoarders must feel all the time."

Buried In Treasures: Holiday Advice

Weblog

Hoarding and Disposal in Tokyo
Fabio Gygi, PhD Student, Anthropology, University College London and University of Tokyo

Hoarding Could Mean OCD

Dec 15, 2006 | 830 words | article link expires Jan 24, 2007

Friends and Family of Hoarders Support

New Yahoo Support Group for all family and friends touched by Compulsive Hoarding.

Join the group here.

Because you'll often hear the term "Collyer" associated with Hoarding, here is some background on where it comes from

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Homer Lusk Collyer (November 6, 1881–March 21, 1947) and Langley Collyer (October 3, 1885–March 1947) were two United States brothers who became famous because of their reclusiveness, filth and compulsive hoarding. The brothers are often cited as a paradigmatic example of compulsive hoarding associated with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, or OCD, as well as disposophobia, or Collyer Brothers Syndrome, a fear of throwing anything away. For decades, neighborhood rumors swirled around the rarely-seen, unemployed men and their home at 2078 Fifth Avenue (at the corner of 128th Street), in Manhattan, where they obsessively collected newspapers, books, furniture, musical instruments, and many other items, with booby-traps set up in corridors and doorways to protect against intruders. Both were eventually found dead in the Harlem brownstone where they had lived as hermits, surrounded by over one hundred tons of junk that they had amassed over several decades.  Source.

Oddballs, Freaks, And Geniuses
Pulitzer-winning Doug Wright does “Grey Gardens”

By CHRISTOPHER MURRAY

Playwright and screenwriter Doug Wright is known for his biting, intelligent, and humane portraits of creative people in emotional distress. His play “Quills” about the final days of the Marquis de Sade in the Charenton asylum was turned into an award-winning film with Geoffrey Rush and Kate Winslet.

He won the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his beautiful meditation on repression and identity, “I Am My Own Wife” about German transvestite Charlotte Von Mahlsdorf.

Now he has written the book for a new musical version of the camp cult classic Maysles Brothers documentary “Grey Gardens” about Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Little Edie and their decaying sanity in a crumbling old mansion in East Hampton. Anticipation is high surrounding the Broadway transfer of the production following a sold-out run at Playwrights Horizons, particularly concerning Tony hopes for the star, Christine Ebersole, who plays both the mother and daughter at different ages. Performances begin October 3.

Christopher Murray: Writing a musical about two agoraphobic old society biddies living in filth is about as perverse as writing a mainstream movie about the Marquis de Sade’s flirtations with his washerwoman. What drives you toward these particular kinds of stories?...