S/O Hoarding. Is this a recent thing?

According to Wikipedia, researchers started studying hoarding in the 1980’s and it was classified as a mental disorder in 2013. So, it seems to be a relatively new phenomenon. But I am sure there has been hoarding all through the ages but not as publicity acknowledged until recently.

We're more aware, I knew of hoarders as a kid 40+ years ago. It was one of those unpleasant problems that family and neighbors talked about discreetly in hushed tones when they thought the kids weren't listening.

One of my fathers friend was a hoarder. IIRC, it didn’t smell strongly but he had a ton of stuff. It was like a maze walking through his apartment and he had tons and tons of collectibles like 1000a of record albums.

Mary Todd Lincoln was a hoarder. So it has been going on over 150 years.

It’s not just people who lived through the Depression, it can be younger people too. If you watch any of the shows about it many of the people who do it didn’t start out that way. A lot of them had some catastrophic situation where they lost a loved one, lost all their stuff in a fire or had some other major turning point event in their life that made something switch in their heads. They put an unrealistic value on the things in their home whether those things have actual value or not and they have a hard time parting with anything as a result. And OMG the excuses they can come up with as to why they can’t get rid of stuff! It seems really, really bizarre some of the stuff people save.

When I think of hoarding I think more of what I see on TV - literally trash kept in the house. Spoiled food, animal feces, etc. That I think is really a mental issue.

I think that the impulse to hoard probably exists everywhere and has throughout history, but I think access to items to hoard has not always existed.

My grandmother was a hoarder without access to great quantities of things. She would keep every last little thing, jars and cans and newspapers, but she lived in rural Wisconsin and there was (still is) one store within 30 miles so access limited what she could accumulate.

I think hoarding has always been a thing. From mild to horrifying/health hazard.

I think the internet, social media and reality tv have brought it to the forefront. Prior to that, you only knew about it, if you had a friend, neighbor or family member who suffered from it, meaning you saw it firsthand.
Nowadays, a photo or story about a hoarding situation can go viral in a matter of seconds, hours or a couple days.....millions of people(complete strangers) know all about it.

I also think, increased house sizes have contributed to hoarding. More room, more square footage, more counter space, bigger closets, bigger garages, etc...means more room for stuff to accumulated.

For some people it an actual sickness. For others it simply a case of pack rat, holding on to stuff, for fear of letting it go just in case 20 years later you might need it or it might fit again.

I think the worst is pet/animal hoarding. Homes with extreme amounts of pets.

Mental illness is being brought forward as we talk about mind sickness more openly.

My psych said psychiatry is like a 3rd world medicine and I asked him if he was working for Drs. Without Borders. He laughed but said yeah. Mental illness is still not well understood.

Like much of TV, I think they sensationalize the worst-case scenarios. It makes for compelling television.

But in reality, hoarding is a sliding-scale type phenomenon. It manifests in any number of ways.

I work for friends who own an auction house. We often pick up whole estates to auction. Sometimes because the family is simply overwhelmed with the sheer volume of 'stuff' the person owned.

It can range from a depression-era survivor who kept every possible useful thing that crossed their paths no matter the condition of the item to people with shopping addictions whose homes are stuffed full of basically brand-new merchandise. Guilt plays a large part in hoarding, too -- people feel compelled to keep things they don't want and will never use, but...

My grandparents got married in 1930 and had their first 5 kids during the depression, and they never threw anything away. On top of that, depression or not, they were grindingly poor (the 11th child, my mom, arrived in 1950 and my grandfather was first a not very good farmer and then a cabinet maker who had a serious beer and cards problem). So anything that might possibly be used was kept. They lived in a two-story house with a large basement, and by the 1970s, every space that was not actively used by family was crammed with junk. So much junk. It was actually really fun for me as a kid - my favorite place to hang out was in the big front room upstairs (they called it a sleeping porch) and the sun room downstairs, both of which were a treasure trove of crap from 1900 onward (my great grandmother and all her stuff came to live with the family in her declining years, so there was crap from her growing up and married years as well). The basement was also a junk heap, but I was mostly too scared to go down there - it had a dirt floor at the back and was unfinished throughout, and gave off very creepy scary movie vibes.

They didn't do the trash hoarding thing, and never had pets in the house, but so. much. junk.

My sister and her husband seem to have a similar thing going on. Her house is piled with stuff from my parents' and grandparents' houses, plus stuff they've collected themselves in 17 years of marriage. She can't bear to get rid of anything that a relative owned, made or touched - from either side of the family. I consider that hoarding.

And I read this post, and now Facebook is showing me articles about hoarding...

I don't think hoarding is a new thing, it's just a more publicized thing.

I agree with hoarding being on a spectrum.

My mom was a hoarder in her later years, but her hoard was neatly organized and contained and stored completely out of sight in an otherwise clean and minimally furnished/decorated home. Nowadays her behavior might be called "stockpiling" but it was really a form of hoarding. She grew up in crushing poverty during the Great Depression, and in her later years started hoarding more canned food than she would ever need or could ever use. Stockpiling is acquiring with a plan of use. Mom just hoarded.

And a friend was a "clean" collecting hoarder. Hoarding doesn't always come with dirt, vermin, and squalor. She hoarded beautiful and valuable things. But to the point where all storage spaces in her home were full and a bedroom and part of an oversized garage became neatly shelved and catalogued storerooms. Collections are great, when they are accessible and displayed and enjoyed on a regular basis. But when it's just shelves of boxed items being stored away indefinitely, what real enjoyment is in owning it? It wasn't collecting at that point, but hoarding.

And then squalor hoarders and animal hoarders. I've known those too. Those are the ones people think about when you say "hoarder". Nobody questions it being a problem.

My mom's hoarding never became a problem, nor did my friend's. But it was still examples of types of hoarding.