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Hoarding: How Collecting Stuff Can Destroy Your Life

post #1 of 2
4/26/10 at 11:35am
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Most of us enjoy our stuff. A new car, designer handbag, or gadget can simplify our lives and bring us status pleasure. Then there are the hoarders, those compelled by an obsession to collect and store things - even that which most of us would consider junk, such as scraps of paper, leaky buckets, and old newspapers. Homes become almost inhabitable. Narrow pathways referred to as "goat trails" wind through piles of stuff and stacks of things cover sofas and beds, rendering the furniture useless. There are between 6 and 15 million hoarders living in the U.S., and some 75 cities now have task forces dedicated specifically toward working with hoarders in their community.

Hoarding: How Collecting Stuff Can Destroy Your Life - Yahoo! News
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post #2 of 2
4/26/10 at 11:43am
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Re: Hoarding: How Collecting Stuff Can Destroy Your Life

I considered my grandma a hoarder, because she literally had stacks and stacks of stuff. Unlike these people though, it was crates of unused stuff. For example, when she died, we found two large cases of coffee creamer. She was poor all her life, so I am guessing this was her larder. She couldn't have been unaware she had bought tp and creamer when she had literally walls full of the stuff. We also found drawers upon drawers of washed and neatly folded tin foil and stacks of clean used cottage cheese containers. Folks always excused hoarding in old people who had lived through the Depression. I think there must be a difference between these Depression hoarders who hoarded due to a fear they would be without and these newer hoarders.

My dh was a hoarder. I admit I get brutal with him. I throw out his oodles of collected useless junk on a regular bases. If it were up to him no cool whip container, newspaper or bottle would ever leave the house. I've been really poor in my life, but I'm not living in a house of junk.
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