Buried Under Stuff: When Hoarding Becomes Pathological

In December 2003, police and rescue workers were called to a two-story brick building in the Bronx to extricate Patrice Moore, forty-three, from his one-room apartment. Moore had been lying on the floor for two days, unable to move his injured legs, after huge stacks of the catalogs and magazines that stuffed his apartment collapsed and pinned him to the floor. As it was, Moore had barely been able to squeeze into his apartment between the piles of junk. Nevertheless, when his landlord threw out most of his stash while he recuperated in the hospital, Moore was so upset he threatened to sue.

Like Patrice Moore, we all find ourselves, to some extent, under a constant deluge of the items we accumulate in daily life. Try going away for two weeks, and look at the mail that piles up. Try sorting through your child’s notebooks and arts-and-crafts projects at the end of the school year. Then there’s all the worn-out clothing, and the broken phones and toys and candy dishes and souvenir coffee cups. Even our e-mail accounts are stuffed with photos, messages, and documents.

Most of us manage to maintain equilibrium in our personal material worlds; we bring things in, but we throw out as well. Others, like Mr. Moore, simply never throw out anything at all. For such folks, a twist-tie may be as difficult to part with as an heirloom brooch.

In cases like these, the regular retention of possessions balloons into pathological hoarding, a condition that creates barriers between hoarders and the people in their world, and often puts life and limb at risk. And it’s a far-from-rare condition: pathological hoarding is now believed to affect as many as 6 million people in the US.