Baby Boomer Clutterers

For older people the challenges of keeping clutter at bay take on a specific dimension. Depression-era mindsets about the value of manufactured goods have not adapted to the short shelf-lives of today’s technology. That same technology is making it even easier, via the Web, to participate in the consumerist frenzy that is American culture.

Meanwhile, household demands have grown in complexity as an array of vendors now deliver cable TV, phone service, Internet access, and cell phone service—and their accompanying monthly bills—to a home already lashed with a steady stream of junk mail. Add the inevitable health concerns, complicated medication schedules, and related memory issues that advancing age can bring on, and a once functional household can descend into chaos practically overnight. The dangers are both physical—a cluttered house is an obstacle course for people with limited mobility—and psychological. Particularly when the day comes that all that stuff has to go.

In the early 1990s Smith College psychologist Randy Frost, Ph.D., placed a classified newspaper advertisement for “pack rats and chronic savers” to participate in a research study and was surprised by the scores of responses he and his team received. “We suspected that we were on to something,” he says. Frost, an expert on obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), became a pioneer in the then-little-known field of compulsive hoarding, a clinical term for the most severe form of cluttering behavior.

Hoarding cases emerge via newspaper headlines periodically whenever authorities uncover homes filled to the rafters with newspapers, garbage, or simply piles of possessions that cover every available surface and often render the homes uninhabitable because of animal infestations or structural damage. Frost estimates there are as many as 4 million hoarders nationwide, but there are far greater numbers of individuals who fall elsewhere in a spectrum of problematic cluttering behavior. Many of the compulsive hoarders are older Americans that have experienced times of deprivation, such as those associated with the Great Depression or WW II.

Understanding the mind of a clutterer is a difficult process. Frost breaks down the behavior into its three major manifestations—compulsive acquisition of useless possessions, living spaces so cluttered they can’t be used, and distress or an inability to function because of the hoarding. The syndrome can appear in patients as young as 13 and tends to worsen with age. While the phenomenon is often associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder, “it happens outside of OCD as well,” he says. There’s also a link with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. Frost’s studies have found hoarders across the income spectrum and around the world. “We know it’s related to materialism, but it’s not just a Western phenomenon,” he says. “There may be a cultural component. We also know that it runs in families, so there may be some genetic influence.”

Nor is it a peculiarly modern malady: history, Frost notes, is full of case studies, including Mary Todd Lincoln, whose compulsive shopping proved a political liability for the 16th president. Frost once speculated that adults who exhibited such behavior were responding to childhood poverty, but the studies did not bear this out. He did discover, however, a different background issue—a link to emotional deprivation and the level of warmth expressed in the family during adolescence.

The National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization (NSGCD), a nonprofit group of 440 professional organizers and psychiatric professionals that Frost consults with, has compiled a five-point Clutter-Hoarding Scale to assess potential clients. Levels III and up are clinical cases that require psychological intervention. At Level I and Level II the sins of the chronically disorganized are detailed: “slight narrowing of household pathways; unclear functions of living room, bedroom; one exit blocked.” It is these minor offenders—the “common clutterers”—that Terry Prince, a Sacramento professional organizer, tries to help. Prince teaches clutter-control classes and workshops for the chronically disorganized, and she’s made her own observations of the species during her career in the field.

“Clutterers are interesting,” she says. “They’re creative. They’re people with a lot of interests.” About one in three of her students, she points out, are teachers—notorious compilers of paper clutter—and many others have craft hobbies, along with an unrealistic number of projects in process and a large backlog of supplies and materials for which they claim, “I’ll get to that someday,” a familiar clutterer’s refrain. “If that’s what you’re hearing,” Prince says, “you’re in trouble.”

My own experience affirms Prince's observation that many clutterers and hoarders are "creative". The term being the politically correct word for illogical and scatter brained. They are driven by emotional responses to everything they come into contact with. This constant surge of psychological emotion prevents them from focusing on developing a logical conclusion to a project or situation. They start a project based on an explosion of feelings and emotions but, very soon another explosion occurs and the previous project is forgotten and abandoned for the new one. On and on and on. There is very little hope for these personalities to conquer their clutter by themselves. They will need constant supervision.