Hoarding - what causes it?

My mother-in-law hoards newspapers and other junk, but she’s schizo, paranoid, has OCD and the onset of dementia.

 

Not even close.Then that would include millions of average,everyday
americans.Hording is much more specific.You make it appear ordinary
like what most drunks drink.Used to be Drunks were either beer,
winos or lush's { anything }.The occasional Country Club boozer.
Hording is specific.A Horder may horde everything but just try
and take away what they horde.They go literally nuts.Like some
items hold really important value to them.
Therein lies the key.What a Horder's pecking order is.
What items they place the highest loyalty over.
Common drunks or rummies are not that specific.

 

In which case, she's probably earned the right to stack newspapers

 

Mom started to become a hoarder before the divorce, probably due to general dissatisfaction with life. Dad couldn't understand why she was so "insecure." After filling up the clothes closet and her bedroom space including under the bed, she cut a hole in the bedroom ceiling and shoved stuff up there (after using up the convenient space around the proper scuttle hole at the other end of the house above my room).

Before she ran out of secluded space, she bought a double apartment from a relative and rented it out to two families. Eventually she stopped renting, left my father, moved in, got a job, and got the divorce. She spent the next few decades filling up the house from end to end on all floors, including basement and attic, plus outbuildings (garages & small barn). It was getting bad but not too bad before the two of us sons moved out on our own, giving her more space to fill.

She would hire my brother's classmates in the neighborhood to help her buy and haul used stuff from the junkyard/junk dealer, sometimes filling up the pickup truck until the weight cracked the rear spring segments. The amusing observation was that she would take a load of trash/useless stuff to the dump and come back with just as big or bigger load of anything and everything: pottery, all sorts of furniture, wood beams, and framed pictures of somebody's unidentified ancestors. She was also buying new items: books, excess clothing items for herself, and various china collectibles. When accused of being a hoarder, she claimed to be a collector instead.

She liked to store her sewing thread spools in shoe boxes and cigar boxes. I bought her a proper storage box with fold-out trays for the spools, but she refused to use it. Always as if she detested simplification/organization. Space was always something to be filled. If I built a rack to get stuff off the floor, she would go out of her way to fill it and overflow onto the floor again.

When she went on vacation for a couple of weeks, my brother spent a week putting the kitchen in proper order. When she got back home, she spent the next week or two getting it right back to the same mess as before.

For a while I was living in a place where the housekeeping was next to immaculate. When Mom came to visit, there we were surrounded by Ethan Alan furniture. She declared: this is awful.

All the while she was addicted to milk, almost always having at least two half-gallon containers of it in the fridge, firmly adhering to the idea that lactose-free would always be trouble-free (it isn't, due to the proteins: casein, whey, & immunoglobulins). After being chastised for opening a third, fourth, and fifth such carton of milk and not throwing out the partly depleted ones that were too old, she got an ice chest, regularly bought a bag of ice, and hid it so that we couldn't see the direct evidence of her overuse. Sometimes she would go semi-berserk from tanking up on milk; the local kids became wary of her sudden "mysterious" Jekyll and Hyde switch (allergic tendencies run in the family).

Hoarding went full bore, even filling up the two bathtubs after she moved to the bungalow inherited from her father, and she was nearly finished stuffing the attic in the bungalow before disability warranted transfer to a nursing home.

Unlike some extreme cases, she did not stack very far towards the ceiling, and she was never obese. She believed that more of everything was better, including outdoor cats.

We humans can be such gross champions of misconceptions and spurious attachments.

 

That was a very interesting read, thank you!

Sounds as though your mother picked up the habit during childhood, and never mastered it. She just kept changing her life and circumstances to accommodate it. Sad, but not terribly uncommon these days. It's also very much a feature of first world living .. in that while it does strike the poor more often, they're only poor by our standards. It's considerably less common in the third world.

I don't over-read that feature, FTR. I think it's simply that in the first world, we can .. so we do. Base animals such as ourselves are never good with plenty. It turns on us.

PS: I'm fascinated by the milk addiction. Haven't seen that one before! As for her tendency to half finish bottles, that's really just a bad habit/laziness. It takes work to organise your consumption efficiently, and some folk just don't want to do that. Ties in with her resistance to order. Order .. to that mindset, equates to work. Work is what they're avoiding.

 

Rightfully so in other cases, but Mom was ambitious. Her problem was aversion to parting with "things." What was of paramount importance to her was "having." Empty space equated to not having as much as possible. Disarray equated to a plethora. If a grocery bag was half full of rags and there was room for another bag, get another bag and some more rags. I got her M.O. down pat.

Edit: Also, the milk addiction continued to the point where it caused intestinal bleeding. She would stop eating and drinking for a couple of days for healing, gradually nibbling & drinking other foods until she was no longer bedridden, then go right back at it again for a relapse! I had to stomp the cartons into the ground out on the lawn. Then she tried to use a niece to go grocery shopping so as to get around my restriction. The niece was unaware of the problem until I arrived in time to intercept.

 

This'd be a good thread on the right forum.

 

Exactly.

Everything I keep has an immediate use, not something I may need one day but something that is functional on an every day basis for the most part.

 

My dad was a hoarder. Mostly though I always had the idea it was mostly about laziness. He was overweight and never exercised. Except for dishes he didn't seem to clean anything. When he couldn't find something he would go buy another. After he died, we found dozens of tape measures and calculators.

After he retired he would often get bored and go to the store. He would buy things that looked interesting but mostly ignore when he got home.

He always talked as if he was going to eventually use all his things. But he died before he got much out of their boxes.

In his house every room was filled full of stuff. The front door could not fully open and there was a narrow path that branched off to his bedroom and the kitchen. But then there was very little that was trash. After he died we had garage sales for weeks on end.

 

No, he hadn't and he never learnt to. He hoarded newspapers and plastic bags too.
We used to have a blitzkrieg clean when the council sent threatening letters. My husband found a possum nesting in one of the grass catchers. His garden was a zoological marvel in suburban Melbourne. He and his neighbours had a mutual loathing.

 

As opposed to that Left forum.!

 

So there must be a name for your obsession over being a
Non-hoarder.A neat freak.Or Obsessive compulsive.
Um ... how long to keep a toothbrush.?
Just askin'.

 

I suppose it actually depends on what you hoard. I like shiny stuff, like gold and platinum.

 

Its what the medical establishment has concluded on the issue. In truth, the label is irrelevant because psychiatry treats symptoms rather than the disease state. The symptoms that psychiatry would treat for such a case would be anxiety which tends to cover symptoms associated with an OCD diagnosis. They might also use antidepressants if applicable in a particular case.

You can argue that mental illness is not real and the person should just snap out of it, but im not sure that available evidence backs up your belief. There is a difference between a collector and a hoarder. A true hoarder without question suffers from a mental illness.

 

It's true that many of those 'reasons' are considered (by those associated with the hoarder, and hoarders themselves), but I do think that they're all just obfuscations, and attempts to 'complexify' a very simple issue - and thus avoid calling it what it is. It's just plain old poor impulse control. In the case of hoarders, very poor impulse control. They're basically like toddlers .. who, if left to their own devices, would quickly eat themselves to death or die in a mound of broken toys.

The milk thing is really fascinating, I have to say. I imagine it's rather rare, since milk itself has no especially addictive properties.

 

A tidy home shows a tidy mind, as they say in the classics!

And they say it because it's true. While much fun is poked at neat freaks, they are almost always more productive, fitter, and healthier, than their counterparts ... the slobs.

 

What exactly is "hoarding money"? You mean people have stacks of money in a room?

 

You got it in one. It IS laziness. Which is a feature of poor impulse control (in the case of laziness, the impulse to sit down!).

Appreciate the story, meantime. It's sad to think that had your dad been a little more vigorous, he may have had the additional years to use all those tape measures. He sounds like he was a good sort though, in that he was interested in making and doing. I like that.

 

The 'medical establishment' (of which I'm formally a part) is compromised by political expediency. Also, there is no settled science on hoarding, so they've just thrown a bunch of stuff at it which doesn't sound tooooo insulting.

A 'true hoarder' is no more likely to be mentally ill than your average alcoholic, or smoker, actually. I think you're applying complexity where none exists.

 

The context in which I am using the term " medical establishment" refers specifically to the concept of evidence based medicine. Political expediency does not play a part in that concept.

In truth, I dont care. You can feel however youd like. I dont have a dog in this fight. Having sold psychotropics for many years and having had countless conversations on this very issue with psychiatrists, I have an insight that many do not. If you want to argue against the medical community on this subject....have at it. My purpose in this conversation isnt to argue that the medical community is either right or wrong, rather I am just telling you what the medical community says on the subject.

 

Being fat is ordinary. Take away fatty’s excess calories and watch them act like a drunk whose booze you took

 

My dad is a hoarder and in an Alzheimer's support facility. From what I've been able to gather, 1) it's common among the older generation, especially those who grew up poor and 2) possessions seem to give them comfort. IMHO, part of it is that ours is a consumerist society where we are inundated daily, at least for those who watch television, with commercials to buy, buy, buy. There is also the strong message that if you don't own "stuff" (see George Carlin) you are a failure. Add to this if you don't buy your loved one's expensive stuff, you're also a failure.

 

It's sadly, and dangerously, true, that the Medical Industry is now compromised in many fields - precisely due to political expediency. PC, in fact, plays a HUGE role in recent revisions of the DSM, and even in General Practice. EG ... GPs can no longer tell a fat person flat out that they are too fat, and need to stop eating. They must 'allude' to it very carefully via gentle discussion of related disease states. If that's not a danger to huge numbers of people, I don't know what is. Why do you think obesity is one of the fastest growing epidemics? It's not cheeseburgers .. it's poor impulse control (the subject of this thread) and 'fat acceptance'.

Don't even get me started on the DSM. That's a hot mess of 'don't hurt the feelings of the crazies'.

 

No, it's called minimalism. I'm not poor but I do the same thing, because in reality I don't need all those things to be happy, and having more crap would only make me feel trapped. By nature I'm slightly nomadic and want to be able to move at any given time if I want.

 

While I agree with you that the medical and psychiatric industries have been compromised by the far left, your own statement here is also problematic. One, obesity is not an "epidemic". An epidemic is an outbreak of disease. Obesity is not a disease. Obesity isn't even a sickness. It's a description of a physical state (being fat). Obesity can cause any number of diseases and early death, but in and of itself, obesity is not a disease and therefore cannot be an epidemic. Two, "poor impulse control" is not a disease. It's not even a solid concept one can grasp easily. Who has poor impulse control, someone who steals a candy bar because it's there or someone who buys a candy bar because it's there? Poor impulse control is just a symptom of the deeper, underlying problem. Why does this person have poor impulse control? Among the lower classes who are always breaking the law and getting arrested, poor impulse control is a symptom of a low IQ and a disconnect between actions and results. Among hoarders, poor impulse control (not really sure that's even an accurate description of their symptoms) is a symptom of a feeling of a lack of love in their lives. Among middle class women who eat too much, poor impulse control is a symptom of a feeling of some other lack in their lives, such as a sense of worth or appreciation. Eating provides a quick shot of good feeling that substitutes for the lack of appreciation from one's spouse, children, boss, etc. (Just one possible example.) So I advise you to refrain from using either of those two terms, "epidemic" for obesity or "poor impulse control" for hoarders.