How common is compulsive hoarding?
Our findings indicate that about 3 to 4 percent of the population — or about six million people — have a hoarding problem, which isn’t all that surprising when you consider that one out of every 10 Americans rents a storage unit. Nearly everyone knows someone who has hoarding tendencies. Do you hoard? No, but I have an elderly family member who does. What’s the difference between hoarding and collecting? Lots of people collect something, often more than one thing. But our collections are things we want to display. We generally put them in a special case or arranged in some special way. And we try to complete our collections. Whereas someone who is hoarding is simply accumulating things they don’t want to part with. They will often collect multiple items of the same type. I recently saw a woman who had multiple jars of the same type of jam and multiple cans of the same type of soup. She has a fear that one day she might run out, so she crams it everywhere she can. When does clutter beco
