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A peculiar event happened in New York City in 1947. Homer and Langley Collyer, offspring of a once affluent and influential New York family, were found dead in their three-story mansion. They had filled their brownstone with stuff—everything imaginable, from tree limbs to antique cars, piled nearly to the ceiling of every room. Langley moved about the house through a series of tunnels to care for Homer, who was paralyzed with rheumatism. Some of the tunnels were booby-trapped to keep out intruders. Investigators later concluded that Langley tripped one of these traps and was crushed under tons of debris. Homer died shortly thereafter. It was three weeks before searchers found Langley’s body because they had to remove more than 120 tons of stuff. During that time, the story dominated the front pages of the New York City papers and made the Collyers a household name. Municipal officials in New York City still refer to such cases as “Collyer tenants.”
The Collyer brothers’ story describes a bizarre behavior, a form of psychopathology that has thus far defied understanding. Their story filled the news for a short time, but the interest did not carry over to the psychiatric community. Fire, health, housing, and elder service officials are much more familiar with these behaviors than are mental health specialists.
The Collyers’ story came to Smith forty-four years later in my seminar on abnormal behavior, one of the advanced seminars that psychology majors must take. In the fall of 1991, during a seminar on obsessive-compulsive disorder, my research specialty, one of the students, Rachel Gross ’92, commented that we had been studying compulsive checking, washing, and even symmetry compulsions, but had not read anything about hoarding. She wanted to know why. Rachel was a New Yorker who since childhood had been fascinated with the Collyer brothers. Throughout her childhood her mother used the Collyer brothers as models of bad domestic behaviors and admonished her to keep her room tidy in order to avoid their fate.
During that semester, Rachel and I combed the literature for research on hoarding. We found none, so we put an ad in the local Daily Hampshire Gazette seeking “pack rats” or “chronic savers,” hoping to get two or three people who would agree to be interviewed. To our astonishment, we received over a hundred phone calls. Many of these callers were desperate for help with their hoarding. We spent the next year studying these people. The results formed the basis for Rachel’s honors thesis and a subsequent paper that became the first systematic study of hoarding. For me, this began more than fifteen years of study of one of the most fascinating groups of people imaginable. Since the initial round of studies, I have collaborated with colleagues Gail Steketee at Boston University, and, more recently, David Tolin at the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut. In addition, a host of students have worked on this research.
Hoarding is not a simple behavior, but rather a set of behaviors. In its simplest form it includes two things—excessive acquisition and the saving of large quantities of things that most people wouldn’t save. Excessive acquisition occurs in several forms, the most frequent of which is compulsive buying. Studies have shown that compulsive buying afflicts approximately 2 percent of the U.S. population, though some researchers suggest that up to 25 percent are borderline compulsive buyers. The chief characteristic of compulsive buying is an inability to stop or control purchases despite negative consequences like financial ruin or relationship difficulties. People who hoard also acquire free things more often than other people. Opportunities for acquiring free things abound in our culture. Libraries give away old books, magazines, and newspapers. Companies give away pens, key chains, and other advertising merchandise. Many communities have free sections at recycling stations or landfills. For people with hoarding problems, these are treasure troves. For people with more intense acquiring problems, Dumpsters and trash day provide limitless access to stuff.
While many people acquire more than they need, their urge for more stuff is often tempered by resources like money, available space, or available time. For people who hoard, these considerations don’t stop them. An episode of NBC’s Dateline program on compulsive hoarding showed a middle-age man with serious hoarding problems going into a discount store (a popular place for hoarders), where he found several left-handed golf clubs for very little money. Despite the fact that he was right-handed, rarely golfed, already had multiple sets of both left- and right-handed golf clubs, and his wife was threatening to leave him because of his hoarding, he could not resist the opportunity to buy them. As the camera focused on his description of the wonders of these particular clubs, it was clear that he was mesmerized by them. This trancelike state is common in hoarders during the process of acquisition.
People who hoard not only acquire more than most people but also throw away less. Hoarders save more things, but interestingly, their reasons for saving are the same as everyone else’s. People save things for three basic reasons. Some objects have sentimental value, usually through a connection to important life events. Other objects have instrumental value; that is, we need them to fulfill some tangible purpose or to complete an activity. Still other things may have little sentimental or instrumental value, but we simply like them. People who hoard use these same reasons for saving; they simply apply them to more things. The ten-year-old newspaper contains information that may one day be of use. The fifteen-year-old straw came from a soft drink at an ice cream social and “feels like a part of me.” The purple note card may be saved simply because it is purple. Hoarding may seem like a bizarre behavior, but the thoughts and beliefs about possessions that drive it are exaggerations of the thoughts and beliefs everyone has about possessions. There may be a little bit of this in all of us.
Acquiring and saving vast quantities of possessions is not, by itself, pathological. Many people acquire and save things. People fill attics, basements, and barns, and spend millions on commercial storage spaces. This may constitute hoarding behavior, but it wouldn’t qualify as a clinical syndrome because it doesn’t produce distress or interfere with living. Difficulty organizing possessions, more than acquiring or saving, produces most of the dysfunction associated with hoarding. For reasons that we are only just beginning to understand, people with this problem pile their possessions in the middle of the room with no apparent organizational scheme. At first glance, the home of a hoarder appears filled with nothing but trash. Closer inspection reveals mixtures of important as well as worthless stuff—car titles mixed with decades-old newspapers, diamond rings inside one of a dozen old Altoid boxes. Mental health specialists have long assumed that hoarders save mostly worthless or worn-out things. It turns out they save everything, valuable as well as worthless. Overlooking this fact has caused considerable difficulty for hoarders who have been “cleaned out” by the health department or housing authority, or even by their relatives. Since it all looks like junk, people attempting to help literally dump it all into the trash. While this gets rid of the decades-old newspapers, it also gets rid of the diamond ring lost in the pile, or the title to the car. Hoarding is much more than a problem with acquisition and saving; more than anything, it is a problem with organization.
Difficulties with organization seem to be related to another prominent characteristic of people who hoard—difficulty making decisions. Ordering from a menu or even deciding what to wear in the morning are tasks that pose significant problems for hoarders. Both organizing and decision making are largely determined by the way information gets processed. One example of the way information processing is different in hoarders has to do with attention, meaning the process by which we notice a stimulus. Hoarders display exaggerated distractibility and attention-deficit-like symptoms, but at the same time they are capable of being hyperfocused, especially when attending to a potential possession or lost treasure. Further, hoarders display a systematic bias to attend to unusual details of an object, like the shape and color of bottle caps. Once noticed, these details give the object value that must be considered in any decision regarding the object. That means any decision related to a possession requires more processing. Interestingly, the tendency to focus on unusual details is a major feature of creativity. In fact, my colleagues and I have long thought that hoarding may be an expression of creativity or even high intelligence. Certainly, the thinking processes in hoarding are more complex.
Much of my recent research has focused on examining information-processing deficits along with the way attachments to possessions are formed and strategies to treat hoarding when it becomes a clinical problem. But studying hoarding poses significant challenges. Quantifying the behavior is one of them. Shortly after our initial study, we received a referral from a local psychiatrist of a man he described (and who described himself) as a severe hoarder. But when we visited, his house was virtually clutter-free, just one small pile of junk mail on his table. At the other extreme, we have seen some Collyer-like hoarders who insist that their homes have no clutter. People use the word “clutter” very differently. For some people “heavily cluttered” means that it is waist deep or worse in every room, for others “heavily cluttered” means that they have a small pile of clutter in one room. People’s descriptions of clutter are heavily influenced by the way they define the word. To solve this problem we set out to create a nonverbal measure of clutter based on pictures.
I posed this challenge to students in my seminar a few years ago. We decided to rent an apartment and take pictures of it in various stages of clutter. The students filled the apartment with newspapers, magazines, bottles, cans, clothes, boxes—mostly stuff they had collected from their houses that was otherwise destined for the Dumpster. We borrowed furniture from the psychology department lounge, though we were nearly arrested by campus security, who caught us carrying a couch out of the building late one night after our seminar meeting.
We filled each room nearly to the ceiling. The volume of stuff required was enormous, so we decided to build the clutter by first stacking empty cardboard boxes as an under-story and then piling stuff on top of it. Not only did this make the job of creating the pile easier, but reducing the clutter by removing boxes allowed us to keep the surface of the clutter constant for each picture, at least until we completely cleared the room.
It took a full day of shooting to photograph each room as we slowly decluttered. To make the process of reducing the clutter easier, we buried one of the students under the piles near the back of the room. In between photos, she popped up and removed boxes from beneath the piles to reduce the clutter for the next shot. I wondered what her family would think about her Smith experience if they knew her professor buried her in clutter for a class project.
The result of the project was a series of nine photographs for each of three rooms that ranged from clutter-free to Collyer-like. Instead of using words to describe the clutter, clients we deal with simply point to the picture that most closely resembles their home. The Clutter Image Rating, as we now call it, is the mainstay for several of our research projects. We’ve had requests for the measure from all over the United States and as far away as South Africa by people studying or treating hoarding problems.
So far our studies have told us a lot about this once mysterious disorder. We’ve learned, for instance, that although closely related to obsessive-compulsive disorder, hoarding appears in other anxiety disorders as well. Depression complicates the problem in over half of hoarding cases. Hoarding runs in families and may be at least partly genetically transmitted. Hoarding typically starts in childhood or early adolescence, but it doesn’t get severe for decades. People’s ability to recognize their hoarding as a problem fluctuates with time and whether they are faced with making a decision about saving something. Though hoarding is notoriously difficult to treat, we’ve had considerable success with our treatment program [see “Learning to let go,” sidebar]. Despite our successes, there is still much to learn about this fascinating behavior. The next few years promise considerable progress in our understanding of this problem. More psychologists and psychiatrists than ever are studying hoarding, including several Smith women who got their start in the abnormal psychology seminar.
Randy Frost is the H.E. and E.S. Israel Professor of Psychology.
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