From JSTOR Daily:
Now that the DSM lists severe hoarding as a disorder apart from OCD, psychologists are asking what explains its prevalence.
Reality TV doesn’t need to do much to sensationalize hoarding. Like rubberneckers at a traffic accident, we gaze in horror at “goat paths” hacked between mounds of newspapers, greasy pizza cartons, bills, checks, mustard packets, broken gadgets, old T-shirts, and stained Tupperware. Crawling with rodents and cockroaches, covered in mildew, mold, and bacteria, these mounds are a fire hazard (according to one study, they cause 24 percent of all avoidable fire deaths) and a fall hazard. They build a wall of shame that blocks the entry of family, friends, even a plumber or electrician. How can people live like this? we murmur.
But many hoarders don’t see their behavior as disordered, and psychology didn’t either—at first. In 2013, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the holy book of psychiatric diagnoses, was revised to list severe hoarding as a disorder in its own right. To meet the diagnostic criteria, someone must have acquired an unmanageable, even hazardous number of possessions that appear to be useless or of limited value—yet would cause them severe distress if discarded.
The original understanding of hoarding, however, had nothing to do with clutter; it was financial avarice. King Midas hoarded gold, as did the tight-fisted clergy who, Dante wrote, would be condemned to the fourth circle of hell. Only in the twentieth century did people begin engaging in the eccentric over-accumulation of random, not terribly valuable stuff.
At first, it was called Collyer’s syndrome, in honor of Homer and Langley Collyer, brothers who, between 1909 and 1947, slowly buried themselves in their family mansion in Harlem, filling it inch by inch. By midcentury, as mass production and a postwar economic boom made it possible for people of modest means to acquire more and more objects, Collyer’s syndrome became more widespread. Psychologists decided that hoarding must be a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder: a repeated, ritualized action intended to ward off anxiety....MORE
