What gets buried: the impact of compulsive hoarding on children

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Television programs like A&E’s “Hoarders” and Discovery Channel’s “Hoarding: Buried Alive” have thrown the reality of hoarding into sharp relief.

The mental illness is thought to be related to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and makes it difficult for a person to determine what’s valuable and what isn’t. Hoarding affects entire families, forcing the children of hoarders to keep secrets about their parent’s debilitating compulsion.  Many children also fear becoming hoarders themselves.

Holly Sabiston grew up with a mother who compulsively shopped and hoarded so much that the family had to take out three mortgages on their 3000 sq. ft. home in Kansas City. Sabiston told Here & Now’s Monica Brady-Myerov that her mother was terrified of others learning about her illness. On the rare occasion that friends or family were invited to Sabiston’s childhood home, the family had to shift and hide the overwhelming piles of possesions behind closed doors–a process experts call “churning.”

“It was definitely a secret,” she said, “There were only a few friends who got to see the inside of the house.”

Randy Frost, professor of psychology at Smith College explains in a video that the best approach for dealing with someone who compulsively hoards is to sit down and talk with them about it. He cautions family members from trying to throw get rid of possessions in an attempt to help.

“The worst thing you can do is to go in and throw things away while they’re not around…in the long run these attempts are usually failures,” he said.

Frost says the key is to get the hoarder to recognize and understand that there is a problem, and to attend a hoarding treatment program.

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