New brain disorder considered: pack rats

Being a well-established pack rat and collector of potentially useful things, I am a little uneasy about the fact that hoarding is regarded by some in the mental health field as a condition that should be classified as a mental illness.

In a canwest news service article, Dr. Sanjaya Saxena, director of the obsessive-compulsive disorders program at the University of California, San Diego, has been studying the condition, which is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder.  However, says Saxena, only a small percentage of hoarders are obsessive-compulsive.  He describes some of the characteristics he has found in hoarders.

1. He describes compulsive hoarding as "the excessive
acquisition of and failure to discard what most would have tossed out
long ago. Hoarders are convinced the material might be useful or
important some day".

Well ye-eah?  You mean that brass doorknob, the bottom half of a plaster lady and the display cabinet for gargoyles would be thrown out by most people?  What about the whole shelf I have of plastic salad containers?  What else are you going to use for mixing and storing things.  When I go to the dump (excuse me, in Bragg Creek it's called the 'Transfer Centre") it's like going shopping only everything is free.  The treasures there are boundless.  And of course I'll use everything someday.  Why, I just finished a sculpture that used three pick ax heads, a shovel and two car wheel drums.  Now what would I have done without those things in my storage shed?

2.  Saxena says the brains of hoarders differ neurologically with "specifically lower activity in some areas" and often an odd shape to their frontal lobes.

I would be very surprised if I had lower activity in some areas of my brain than what is considered to be "normal".  However, the odd shape to the frontal lobe thing?  I wouldn't be surprised.  Maybe in the shape of a garbage can.

3.  Saxena says the trait appears to "breed true", that is, runs in families.  

I come from a family of six and I can say without reservation that I am the only pack rat.  My daughters are definitely not hoarders either although one of them kind of "accidentally" lets things pile up.  It's not a matter of hoarding; it's a housecleaning issue.

4.  Another quality, says Saxena, is unreasonable emotional attachment to things.  He mentions the woman who couldn't throw out her dead aunt's dressing gown, or even the kleenex in the pocket, because it would be like "throwing out a piece of her".

You wouldn't count the boxes of my kids' school work upstairs (they graduated from university more than 15 years ago) or the container of seashells beachcombed in Jamaica in 1974 as being "unreasonable emotional attachment", would you?  And what about my Thing Collection? 

5.  Another kind of hoarding is excessive spending on things you don't need, says Saxena. 

This sounds a bit like legal shoplifting.  This kind of hoarder has rooms full of clothes never worn and items never used but they are convinced that they will need the things someday. That is definitely not me.  So there, you see?  Saxena is definitely off base on this one.  I admit I'm a pack rat, but I do not admit to being mentally ill.  By the way, two Dutch doctors in this month's American Journal of Psychiatry kind of agree with me.  They think that more research is needed before creating hoarding as a new classification of mental illness.

Personally, I think pack ratting is a positive quality. 

P.S.  Although I've been quite light-hearted about my own pack ratting issue, I am quite aware that, like most mental illnesses, it's a matter of degree.  If you want to see some serious hoarding problems and read about some of the stories, check out www.childrenofhoarders.com