Collecting Or Compulsive Hoarding Syndrome?
01.18.07By Deanna DahlsadLast night on ABC’s Medical Mysteries there was a story on hoarders, folks who have so much junk in their homes they cannot live in them. While I’m not saying that all collectors are so afflicted, there were some really interesting points about the brains of these people that I thought were relevant to us.
Dr. David Tolin, the director of the Anxiety Disorders Center at the Institute of Living in Hartford, Conn., has devoted his career to studying what goes on inside the mind of a hoarder and he believes that such hoarding, currently considered a subset of obsessive compulsive disorder or OCD, really may be a unique disorder completely separate from OCD.
Included in Tolin’s work, and the TV show, were brain scans of hoarders taken during the process of decision making and even loss of their objects. While hooked up to a brain-scan machine hoarders are asked to look at pieces of their clutter, such as mail and coupons, and then decide whether to save them or throw them out. When they decided to toss things, they then had to watch it get shredded. (I can only imagine!)
At this point, two parts of a hoarder’s brain become active, each at odds with one another. The brain’s hippocampus “actively searches for memories about the object.” While most people don’t think about objects too much — they just let their orbitofrontal cortex make a decision — the hoarder thinks about the object, why they saved it, memories of getting the object, etc.
As a collector, I feel this way about most of my objects. I remember the funny little shop I bought it in, the sweater the lady who rung up the sale was wearing, where I first placed it when I came home, and nearly every place that object has been in my homes.
This ‘war’ between the two parts of the brain, rational decision making vs. memory, is comparable to punishment, according to Tolin. “When the person is trying to make a decision about what to throw away, it seems that the person who is hoarding, is processing this activity as if it is deeply punishing,” he said. “The person who hoards is going through a very, very effortful search of their memory to try to think of as many things as they can about this item before they make the decision. What this all amounts to then is a painful and effortful process of decision-making, that you and I might take for granted.”
Dr. Randy Frost, a professor of psychology at Smith College in Massachussetts, says, “One of the things we know about hoarding is that the beliefs people have about their possessions are so powerful, that it’s very difficult for them to get out of this behavior.” Now isn’t that the truth. My beliefs about my possessions are powerful… Just try and take that item out of my hands at a flea market — I double-dog-dare-you!
Gee, if I understand this — relate to it even — does that mean I have it? …But wait, just like with Ginsu Knives there’s more!
The hippocampus not only plays a part in memory, but in spatial navigation too. This is why hoarders (and I) don’t need to make nice neat stacks of orderly organization. We don’t have all our magazines in one pile, our bills in another, and a third for our tax forms because we don’t need to rely on neatness to find our stuff.
We know that our November issue of Fine Books & Collections is on that stack on the left, under the fuzzy duck bank, about half-way down, just under the folder with our tax forms. We can see it there. We can produce it anytime we like.
And I can tell you just how it got there — along with the duck bank and how and where I bought him…
If hoarding is a real syndrome, I just may have to call in sick tomorrow.
Tolin and Frost have co-authored “Buried in Treasures,” a self-help book about compulsive hoarding syndrome which I’m sure mom will buy me after she reads this.
