Overcoming Compulsive Hoarding


Book Description

Although the much-satirized image of a house overflowing with National Geographics and infested with cats may make us chuckle, the reality of compulsive hoarding is no laughing matter. The most common reason for evictions in the US and a significant risk factor for fatal house fires, compulsive hoarding is a treatable condition related to obsessive-compulsive disorder. It is characterized by the acquisition of possessions that have little or no value, which the sufferer, often referred to as the saver, has great difficulty discarding. This book, the first ever written for savers and their families, provides an overview of compulsive hoarding and how it relates to obsessive-compulsive disorder. It discusses hoarding broadly, offering readers perspectives on the physical, behavioral, and value-oriented aspects of the condition. You can use its assessment tools to help decide why you or your loved one hoards. Skill-building exercises help you determine how to beat the hoarding problem by addressing issues that often underlie compulsive saving. Even though this is fundamentally a self-help book, it contains a frank discussion about the need for professional help in some hoarding cases, how to find it, and what medications have been proven effective for savers.




Compulsive Hoarding and Acquiring


Book Description

The problem of compulsive hoarding and acquiring is more widespread than commonly believed. It often goes undiagnosed, either because sufferers are ashamed of their compulsions or because they dont believe it is a problem that merits professional attention. As much as two percent of the U.S. population suffers secretly from this condition. However, compulsive hoarding can be an emotionally exhausting, uncontrollable, and sometimes dangerous problem. Written by the developers of this groundbreaking treatment, this manual is the first to present an empirically supported and effective CBT program for treating compulsive hoarding and acquiring. This guide gives clinicians the information to understand hoarding and proven tools to help clients overcome their compulsive behaviors. It teaches individuals how to recognize errors in thinking and uses both imagined and real exposures to teach them the skills they need to manage their problem. Home visits by the clinician are a part of the treatment, as well as consultations with other professionals who might assist if necessary. Homework exercises include behavioral experiments to test personal beliefs about possessions, developing an organization plan and filing system, and sorting and organizing items room-by-room. Designed to be used in conjunction with the corresponding workbook, this therapist guide provides numerous assessment and intervention forms to help clients use the methods described in this program. Complete with case examples and strategies for dealing with problems, this user-friendly guide is a dependable resource that no clinician can do without. TreatmentsThatWorkTM represents the gold standard of behavioral healthcare interventions! · All programs have been rigorously tested in clinical trials and are backed by years of research · A prestigious scientific advisory board, led by series Editor-In-Chief David H. Barlow, reviews and evaluates each intervention to ensure that it meets the highest standard of evidence so you can be confident that you are using the most effective treatment available to date · Our books are reliable and effective and make it easy for you to provide your clients with the best care available · Our corresponding workbooks contain psychoeducational information, forms and worksheets, and homework assignments to keep clients engaged and motivated · A companion website (www.oup.com/us/ttw) offers downloadable clinical tools and helpful resources · Continuing Education (CE) Credits are now available on select titles in collaboration with PsychoEducational Resources, Inc. (PER)




Stuff


Book Description

The New York Times bestseller. “Gripping . . . By turns fascinating and heartbreaking . . . Stuff invites readers to reevaluate their desire for things.”—Boston Globe “Amazing . . . utterly engrossing . . . Read it.”—The Washington Post Book World What possesses someone to save every scrap of paper that’s ever come into his home? What compulsions drive a person to sacrifice her marriage or career for an accumulation of seemingly useless things? Randy Frost and Gail Steketee were the first to study hoarding when they began their work a decade ago. They didn’t expect that they would end up treating hundreds of patients and fielding thousands of calls from the families of hoarders. Their vivid case studies (reminiscent of Oliver Sacks) in Stuff show how you can identify a hoarder—piles on sofas and beds that make the furniture useless, houses that can be navigated only by following small paths called goat trails, vast piles of paper that the hoarders “churn” but never discard, even collections of animals and garbage—and illuminate the pull that possessions exert over all of us. Whether we’re savers, collectors, or compulsive cleaners, very few of us are in fact free of the impulses that drive hoarders to extremes. “Authoritative, haunting, and mysterious. It is also intensely, not to say compulsively readable.”—Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning author “Fascinating . . . a good mix of cultural and psychological theories on hoarding.”—Newsweek “Pioneering researchers offer a superb overview of a complex disorder that interferes with the lives of more than six-million Americans . . . An absorbing, gripping, important report.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)




Buried in Treasures


Book Description

Describes the psychological roots of compulsive hoarding and presents practical strategies for treating and overcoming the behavior.




Digging Out


Book Description

In Digging Out, two psychologists who specialize in compulsive hoarding show readers with a friend or family member who hoards how to use harm reduction, a proven-effective model, to help their loved one live safely and comfortably in his or her own home and improve their relationship with the hoarder.




Hoarding


Book Description

Hoarding disorder is the excessive saving of objects and difficulty parting with them to a point that clutter in the home interferes with one's ability to use rooms and furnishings for their intended purpose. Hoarding: What Everyone Needs to Know demystifies this complex problem, what it looks like and why it may develop, and how it can be treated.




Dirty Secret


Book Description

A fascinating look at compulsive hoarding by a woman whose mother suffers from the disease. To be the child of a compulsive hoarder is to live in a permanent state of unease. Because if my mother is one of those crazy junk-house people, then what does that make me? When her divorced mother was diagnosed with cancer, New York City writer Jessie Sholl returned to her hometown of Minneapolis to help her prepare for her upcoming surgery and get her affairs in order. While a daunting task for any adult dealing with an aging parent, it’s compounded for Sholl by one lifelong, complex, and confounding truth: her mother is a compulsive hoarder. Dirty Secret is a daughter’s powerful memoir of confronting her mother’s disorder, of searching for the normalcy that was never hers as a child, and, finally, cleaning out the clutter of her mother’s home in the hopes of salvaging the true heart of their relationship—before it’s too late. Growing up, young Jessie knew her mother wasn’t like other mothers: chronically disorganized, she might forgo picking Jessie up from kindergarten to spend the afternoon thrift store shopping. Now, tracing the downward spiral in her mother’s hoarding behavior to the death of a long-time boyfriend, she bravely wades into a pathological sea of stuff: broken appliances, moldy cowboy boots, twenty identical pairs of graying bargain-bin sneakers, abandoned arts and crafts, newspapers, magazines, a dresser drawer crammed with discarded eyeglasses, shovelfuls of junk mail . . . the things that become a hoarder’s “treasures.” With candor, wit, and not a drop of sentimentality, Jessie Sholl explores the many personal and psychological ramifications of hoarding while telling an unforgettable mother-daughter tale.




Possessed


Book Description

In Possessed, Rebecca R. Falkoff asks how hoarding—once a paradigm of economic rationality—came to be defined as a mental illness. Hoarding is unique among the disorders included in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5, because its diagnosis requires the existence of a material entity: the hoard. Possessed therefore considers the hoard as an aesthetic object produced by clashing perspectives about the meaning or value of objects. The 2000s have seen a surge of cultural interest in hoarding and those whose possessions overwhelm their living spaces. Unlike traditional economic elaborations of hoarding, which focus on stockpiles of bullion or grain, contemporary hoarding results in accumulations of objects that have little or no value or utility. Analyzing themes and structures of hoarding across a range of literary and visual texts—including works by Nikolai Gogol, Arthur Conan Doyle, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Luigi Malerba, Song Dong and E. L. Doctorow—Falkoff traces the fraught materialities of the present to cluttered spaces of modernity: bibliomaniacs' libraries, flea markets, crime scenes, dust-heaps, and digital archives. Possessed shows how the figure of the hoarder has come to personify the economic, epistemological, and ecological conditions of modernity. Thanks to generous funding from New York University and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.







Inside Animal Hoarding


Book Description

This text profiles one of the largest and most intriguing cases of animal hoarding in recent history. It offers insight about animal hoarders, including how they see themselves, how society deals with them, and why people find them so perplexing.