Hoarding

Hoarding is an aspect of senior health that is especially difficult on families. Although hoarding can occur at any age, it most commonly becomes a problem in seniors.

Hoarding is unchecked accumulation of animals or possessions.

Swampy's aunt is a hoarder. This article describes his obervations on her behavior.

Hoarding is different than collecting. Collectors only accumulate specific items, such as vintage radios. They generally treasure additions to their collection, and they often want people to see their collection.

Hoarding is different than compulsive shopping. Compulsive shoppers look for and acquire possessions, but may not keep them. Obviously, many hoarders are also compulsive shoppers.

Swampy's theory on hoarding

Swampy has a theory on how hoarding works based on watching his aunt, who is a hoarder.

Economists have a term called "marginal utility". A marginal utility is the amount of use a person gets out of each item acquired. So if a person has no car, buying a car has utility. If the same person had three cars, buying a fourth car would not add much utility. The only people that own four cars are collectors or have very unusual situations.

Think for a moment about how this works in your brain. When you are out shopping, you see something that you like on the shelf of a store, for purposes of illustration, say it is a can of tomato soup. Let us further suppose that the can of soup is on sale. You think "I like tomato soup."

Now, do you actually buy the soup? Maybe you will. You will run through a decision tree -- did you eat tomato soup recently? Do you have three or four cans already at home? Are you trying to watch your sodium intake?

The part of your brain that runs the decision tree is in your frontal lobe. The part of your brain that reaches out to grab the item is a resolve circuit that is lower in the brain.

So the brain circuitry in a normal person works like this:

See soup AND Need soup decision tree THEN take action to buy

Its actually a little more complicated. See soup is connected to action to buy, but the decision tree is allowed to influence whether action takes place.

An easy mistake is to think that the hoarder does not have the decision tree to decide if the item is needed or not. Not so! The hoarder runs the same decision tree, but the connection between the tree result and the action as a requirement ("I only buy soup if I need it") is not present.

Here is how you can tell. Ask the hoarder when they are buying the soup -- do you need the soup? Swampy's aunt will tell you that ker house is a mess, that they already have 50 cans of soup, that they have not eaten that particular kind of soup in twenty years.

Swampy's aunt knows that she has too many possessions, so why does she continue to accumulate them?

Sometimes, the discussion will lead to a rationalization. Sure my house is a mess, and I already have 50 other cans of soup, but this one has a different color label, or this one is low fat, or something else...

It is certainly possible that a person will not have the decision tree, or may have dementia manifest in not remembering whether or not soup had been eaten recently. This will manifest as the accumulation of possessions, but Swampy believes this is a separate disorder.

Inability to Discard

Hoarders also cannot discard possessions. In the case of Swampy's aunt, it is a fear that the discard will be something needed, a fear of robbery. Swampy's aunt believes that if she were to discard mail with her name on it, someone would find out her address and rob her. Lest you wonder, a shredder would not help, because Swampy's aunt does not believe that a shredder sufficiently destroys the information.

It is extremely difficult to tell if the fear is a thing in and of itself, or if it is a rationalization for not discarding objects. Swampy's observation is that it depends on the object.

Here are some of the reasons for not discarding objects:

Expired food. I like having lots of food in the kitchen. Its my food.

Newspapers: I have not read the obituary. There might be an interesting article.

Mail: It has my name on it. It might be something I need to act on.

Dealing with Hoarding

Swampy has come to the uncomfortable conclusion that the large number of possessions in his Aunt's home is a safety hazard. Furthermore, rational arguments, cajoling, even hiring qualified people to clean has not lessened the number of possessions.  This is probably a common frustration of people facing hoarding. We naturally do not want to upset our relatives. After all, we feel obligated to help a senior, not to take action that would remove them from their house or free them of possessions.