What is Hoarding Disorder?
Hoarding disorder is a persistent difficulty in discarding possessions, regardless of the value of the items in question. The hoarded items can be of any kind, regardless of actual value. Rather, persons with hoarding disorder feel a strong need to save the items in question and experience significant distress when they are discarded.
This difficulty is far more than simply being “messy” – persons with hoarding disorder frequently accumulate so many items that their living spaces become unusable for their intended purposes, such as filling a kitchen with so many items that cooking is no longer possible, or a bedroom with so many items that it is no longer physically possible to sleep there. Accordingly, living spaces can become unsafe.
Hoarding tendencies typically begin early in childhood and increase in severity with each decade across an entire lifespan. While many individuals begin to display hoarding behaviors in early preteen or teenage years, functional interference from those behaviors may not be readily apparent until their mid-20s, with clinically significant impairment occurring by the mid-30s. By the time these individuals reach their 50s and beyond, hoarding behaviors and the impairment resulting from them can be quite severe.
Treatment for Hoarding Disorder
CEH clinicians provide specialized hoarding-specific cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for those who struggle with hoarding disorder. Therapy involves helping individuals to change how they think about their possessions, build distress tolerance and emotional coping skills, and challenges individuals to change their decision making process regarding their possessions. This process begins with a thorough psychological evaluation and behavior assessment. The individual is then provided with education regarding hoarding and the context of the behavior and its treatment.
Therapy proceeds with helping individuals to better understand the relationship between their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and begin to challenge and restructure the unhelpful thought processes that maintain the hoarding behavior. The individual is then gradually guided in a systematic process of confronting their distress and making decisions regarding their possessions, while utilizing their newly acquired skills in order to effectively manage their living spaces and improve their daily functioning.