Unexpectedly good summary of hoarding
May. 8th, 2025 06:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitouthttps://www.spauldingdecon.com/blog/hoarding-is-on-the-rise
This is a company that provides cleanup services. Cleaning up a hoard at an apartment building is a service they provide to landlords. You can see where they might develop some real insight as a result.
“This can leave seniors feeling lonely and as if they are separate from the rest of the world. They look for things that can help them to better cope with their feelings of isolation and depression. In most cases, this means collecting more things for the house or apartment. It could be anything from clothing to food to trinkets, and even animals for companionship.”
There’s a lot more there, but it is a surprisingly forthright and compassion description of the issues, that does not treat it as an individual problem but rather as a problem that is the result of a number of specific changes in our society.
I knew that people who hoard don’t need to buy stuff to create a hoard, but it was also very clear to me that things took a turn in the 1990s, and likely that was because there were so many inexpensive things that one could buy versus earlier. While this blog entry does a good job of hitting all the points, it could more clearly lay out the problem. Things are so cheap in our society, that there is no value extraction possible for many things, so the quality of free / abandoned goods is very high compared to what it once was. You put free / abandoned and simultaneously In Good Shape / Nice together, and put that in front of someone with a set shifting executive function problem and I think you almost automatically get a hoard.
ETA:
This is a look at literary representations of hoarding.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9629820/
“ Neither these classical European writers nor their medical contemporaries appear to consider hoarding a medical disorder during their time, but rather a prudent response to the economic circumstances in which most people lived. Hoarding was misjudged from this standpoint until the present when hoarding was seen in situations with a lack of a true economic, historic, or cultural reason, helping to focus attention on this visible disorder.”
You could just as easily conclude the reverse. Hoarding is a prudent response, that has ceased to make sense in our time, and so we treat it as a medical disorder.
This is a company that provides cleanup services. Cleaning up a hoard at an apartment building is a service they provide to landlords. You can see where they might develop some real insight as a result.
“This can leave seniors feeling lonely and as if they are separate from the rest of the world. They look for things that can help them to better cope with their feelings of isolation and depression. In most cases, this means collecting more things for the house or apartment. It could be anything from clothing to food to trinkets, and even animals for companionship.”
There’s a lot more there, but it is a surprisingly forthright and compassion description of the issues, that does not treat it as an individual problem but rather as a problem that is the result of a number of specific changes in our society.
I knew that people who hoard don’t need to buy stuff to create a hoard, but it was also very clear to me that things took a turn in the 1990s, and likely that was because there were so many inexpensive things that one could buy versus earlier. While this blog entry does a good job of hitting all the points, it could more clearly lay out the problem. Things are so cheap in our society, that there is no value extraction possible for many things, so the quality of free / abandoned goods is very high compared to what it once was. You put free / abandoned and simultaneously In Good Shape / Nice together, and put that in front of someone with a set shifting executive function problem and I think you almost automatically get a hoard.
ETA:
This is a look at literary representations of hoarding.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9629820/
“ Neither these classical European writers nor their medical contemporaries appear to consider hoarding a medical disorder during their time, but rather a prudent response to the economic circumstances in which most people lived. Hoarding was misjudged from this standpoint until the present when hoarding was seen in situations with a lack of a true economic, historic, or cultural reason, helping to focus attention on this visible disorder.”
You could just as easily conclude the reverse. Hoarding is a prudent response, that has ceased to make sense in our time, and so we treat it as a medical disorder.