What Causes Hoarding Disorder?
Although it is not totally clear what causes it, hoarding is thought to be caused by a number of factors. A cause of hoarding is emotional dysregulation in the form of depression or anxiety along with family histories of hoarding and high levels of perfectionism. Experiencing a traumatic event or serious loss, such as the death of a spouse or parent, may lead to a worsening of hoarding behavior. Genetics, brain chemistry, and stressful life events are possible causes.
What Should I Do If I Am or Know A Hoarder?
The first step of treating this disorder is to diagnose it. Mental health providers perform a thorough psychological evaluation. The evaluation involves a questionnaire about the acquiring and discarding objects.
Treatment of hoarding disorder can be challenging because many people don't recognize the negative impact of hoarding on their lives or don't believe they need treatment. It can also be challenging because hoarders are in a delicate state of mind and can be very sensitive to certain treatment options.
Hoarders whose homes are cleared without their consent often experience extreme distress and may become further attached to their possessions, so a better idea is to target the behavior and not the actual clutter. Being confrontational with a hoarder over their clutter and filth will cause them to become defensive. When faced with the prospect of discarding or parting with their things, a person with hoarding disorder will experience distress. Some hoarders may in part want to get help, while another part of them thinks hoarding is serving some useful goal in their life.
Steps to care for a hoarder include sticking to a treatment plan, keeping up personal hygiene, getting proper nutrition, and accepting assistance.When speaking with a friend/family member who is ready to talk about hoarding, remember to respect, sympathize, encourage, and team up with them. Helping link the hoarding to some emotional goal can help motivate them to get treatment.
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Hoarding Disorder
Hoarding has begun to be linked with serious forms of mental illness like obsessive-compulsive disorder(OCD) and schizophrenia. Hoarders with OCD may be preoccupied with order and symmetry, have difficulty throwing things out (so they accumulate), or hoard unneeded items. Some estimate that as many as one in four people with OCD also suffer from compulsive hoarding. Recent research suggests that nearly one in five compulsive hoarders have non-hoarding OCD symptoms.
Common OCD symptoms are washing hands, locking doors, or combing hair, all repeatedly. People with OCD can’t control their obsessions and compulsions. Common rituals are a need to repeatedly check things, touch things (especially in a particular sequence), or count things. For many people, OCD starts during childhood or the teen years. Most people are diagnosed by about age nineteen.
OCD sometimes runs in families, but no one knows for sure why some people have it while others don’t. It can be accompanied by eating disorders, other anxiety disorders, or depression. It affects approximately 2.2 million American adults and strikes men and women in roughly equal number. The most commonly prescribed medications for OCD are anti-anxiety medications and antidepressants. A type of psychotherapy called cognitive behavior therapy is especially useful for treating OCD.
Animal Hoarding
A subtype of hoarding disorder is animal hoarding. Animal hoarders are people who accumulate a large number of animals, fail to provide minimal standards of nutrition, sanitation, and veterinary care; and fail to act on the deteriorating condition of the animals, the environment, and their own health.
Thousands of animals suffer and die in squalid surroundings, devoid of adequate food and water, yet the owners insist nothing is wrong. They see animals as safer and less threatening than people. Many animal hoarders are found to have hoarded inanimate objects as well. People who hoard animals may use them to fulfill emotional needs that had been previously met by human interaction, according to recent studies.
They justify their behavior with the view that the animals are surrogate children and that no one else will care for them. Recidivism, the repetition of an offense, in animal hoarding is thought to be nearly 100 percent without intervention.
Animal hoarding plagues communities across America on a daily basis with approximately 1,500 new cases discovered each year. These cases are very cruel due to their long, dragged out nature, for example: “Although the case of a dog being violently killed is shocking, in animal hoarding cases the suffering can be felt by hundreds of animals for months and months on end”. Most animal hoarding case conditions become extreme before law enforcement officials can glean enough evidence for a search warrant.
