Hoarding and hoarders have suddenly become all the rage lately, thanks in large part to the A&E network's documentary show "Hoarders," which airs a weekly episode detailing the life (and clean up efforts) of hoarders.

Hoarding strikes a chord with most of us, because it's so easy to see how someone could get there.  I recently realized that somehow I had accumulated about 50 of those clear plastic tubs for leftovers, many of which were missing there lids.  Is there any reasonable situation in which I will need 50 clear plastic tubs for leftovers all at once STAT?  No, there is not.  So I threw them away.

Scale that up, leave out the bit about throwing them away, and you have yourself a hoarder.  I'm on one end of the hoarding spectrum, being a typical American in the year 2009 who is constantly fighting a battle against clutter.  At the other end of the spectrum are people whose entire house is filled floor to ceiling with junk, leaving only a narrow path through the chaos - and sometimes not even that.

From a psychiatric perspective, hoarding currently exists in a sort of twilight zone.  In the DSM-IV, the handbook of psychiatric disorders, hoarding is listed as a symptom of OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder).  Hoarding does seem to be linked to OCD, and according to one article I found online, "30% to 40% of OCD patients report hoarding and saving symptoms."  However, that same article goes on to argue that hoarding should be considered a separate disease, not least because "Hoarding severity does not correlate with the severity of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder symptoms."

In fact, Frost and Hartl, considered experts on the psychiatry of hoarding, advocate that hoarding be considered "a discrete clinical syndrome."  A number of other psychiatrists and doctors feel the same way, and there is a groundswell movement to have hoarding given its own classification in the next revision of the DSM.  Frost and Hartl's clinical definition of hoarding is:

*    the acquisition of, and failure to discard, a large number of possessions that appear to be useless or of limited value

*    living spaces sufficiently cluttered so as to preclude activities for which those spaces were designed

*    significant distress or impairment in functioning caused by the hoarding

*    reluctance or inability to return borrowed items; as boundaries blur, impulsive acquisitiveness could sometimes lead to kleptomania or stealing

I worry that hoarding is the new armchair tourism, and that hoarders are being scapegoated and paraded around as sheer entertainment.  And honestly, it does make for gripping television.  (If you don't have cable, or missed an episode, you can watch A&E's "Hoarders" here on their website.)

On the other hand, apparently "millions" of people suffer from hoarding syndrome.  This number was a little surprising to me, and I suppose it would be to most people whose knowledge of hoarding is limited to having vaguely heard of the Collyer brothers.  From that perspective, it's good to shed some light on hoarding, to give people a framework for understanding their own problems, and help them understand that they are not alone in suffering from this problem - and that it's a real thing, not just a personal failing, and that they can get help for it.