Keepers of the World

We all have too much stuff.  80% of what we own we never use.  We spend an hour a day just looking for things.    We hold on to stuff because some day 'we might need it.'  Hoarders are greatly stressed by the thought of throwing anything away.

With compulsive hoarders, all that stuff is harming their lives. Some people even die, suffocated by all their stuff, a Death by Clutter. 

How many of us are compulsive hoarders? Estimates range from 1.5 to 6 million people in the U.S.

Compulsive hoarding may be a distinctive diagnostic category now that we have brain wave images that show distinct abnormalities. 

Hoarders were found to have lower activity in a specific part of the brain that’s involved in decision-making, focused attention and the regulation of emotion.

Submerged in stuff, hoarders keep collecting

“Hoarders have a fundamental inability to keep things organized,” says Frost. “Not just their possessions, but other things, like finishing tasks. We see a lot of attention deficit problems in hoarding.”

For actress Delta Burke, it was antique furniture and porcelain dolls — enough to fill 27 climate-controlled storage units.

For Roger Gorman’s father-in-law, it was books, newspapers, plastic grocery bags and leisure magazines.

“There must have been over 2,000 magazines in his apartment,” says the 53-year-old graphic designer from Manhattan. “There were stacks and stacks of them, columns of them. It looked like the landscape of a city.”

The good news is that hoarding can be easily treated.  Pigpen started squalorsurvivors after she learned that "Being keeper for the world is too big a burden for one person to bear."