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Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things Paperback – January 4, 2011

4.5 out of 5 stars 900

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A New York Times Bestseller

Acclaimed psychologists Randy Frost and Gail Sketetee's groundbreaking study on the compulsion of hoarding, "
Stuff invites readers to reevaluate their desire for things” (Boston Globe).

What possesses someone to save every scrap of paper that’s ever come into his home? What compulsions drive a woman like Irene, whose hoarding cost her her marriage? Or Ralph, whose imagined uses for castoff items like leaky old buckets almost lost him his house? Or Jerry and Alvin, wealthy twin bachelors who filled up matching luxury apartments with countless pieces of fine art, not even leaving themselves room to sleep?

When Frost and Steketee became the first scientists to study hoarding, they expected to find a few sufferers. Instead, they uncovered an epidemic, treating hundreds of patients and fielding thousands of calls from the families of others, exploring the compulsion through a series of compelling case studies in the vein of Oliver Sacks.

With vivid portraits that show us the traits by which 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—Frost and Steketee explain the causes and outline the often ineffective treatments for the disorder.They also illuminate the pull that possessions exert on all of us.

Whether we’re savers, collectors, or compulsive cleaners, none of us is free of the impulses that drive hoarders to the extremes in which they live. For the six million sufferers, their relatives and friends, and all the rest of us with complicated relationships to our things,
Stuff answers the question of what happens when our stuff starts to own us.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Pioneering researchers offer a superb overview of a complex disorder that interferes with the lives of more than six-million Americans. . . . Writing with authority and compassion, the authors tell the stories of diverse men and women who acquire and accumulate possessions to the point where their apartments or homes are dangerously cluttered with mounds of newspapers, clothing and other objects. . . . An absorbing, gripping, important report." --Kirkus (starred) "Like those classics of psychological study, A. R. Luria's The Mind of the Mnemonist and Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Stuff is authoritative, haunting, and mysterious. It is also intensely, not to say compulsively readable."--Tracy Kidder "A fascinating book--Stuff is the stuff of nightmares, of people living in a world subsumed by their obsession to collect and hoard things. You will surely recognize, to one degree or another, a part of yourself in these portraits."--Jonathan Harr, author of The Lost Painting and A Civil Action

"Eye-opening... Frost and Steketee write with real sympathy and appreciation for hoarders...This succinct, illuminating book will prove helpful to hoarders, their families, and mental health professionals who work with them." -- Publishers Weekly

"An excellent starting point for family, friends, and neighbors of hoarders, but the vivid writing will attract readers who enjoy fiction or memoirs about extreme behavior." --
Library Journal, starred review

"Very intriguing. . . Most readers will recognize some aspects of themselves in the people the authors discuss. We may not be hoarders exactly, but the authors make us take a closer look at our own lives, wondering (for example) about that very fine line that divides a collector from a hoarder. Fascinating stuff." --
Booklist

"Fascinating." --
People
"[The authors] invite us graciously into territory that might otherwise make us squirm . .  .To those who need to understand hoarders, perhaps in their own family, Stuff offers perspective. For general readers, it is likely to provide useful stimulus for examining how we form and justify our own attachments to objects.” --
New York Times Book Review

"Stuff is worth reading not only because of the authors’ authority on the subject, but also because of its elegant prose, and its nuanced and well-researched take on the subject.” -- Salon.com

"[The authors'] examples are rich in storytelling and dialogue, and they admirably balance a fascination with the psychological profiles of their subject with a deep sympathy for their plights . . . The book is a valuable study of a poorly understood condition." --
Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Amazing... Utterly engrossing." -- Washington Post

"Gripping . . . A highly readable account of this perplexing impulse . . . The book succeeds beyond mere voyeurism, because Stuff’ invites readers to reevaluate their desire for things." -- Boston Globe

From the Back Cover

New York Times Bestseller "Gripping . . . by turns fascinating and heartbreaking . . . Stuff invites readers to reevaluate their desire for things." —Boston Globe "Authoritative." —Wall Street Journal What possesses someone to fill warehouses with unread magazines? Or to pack a house so full that clearing it out must be done from the top down—lest the upper story collapse? When Randy Frost and Gail Steketee became the first scientists to study hoarding, they expected to find a few sufferers. Instead, they uncovered a startling epidemic. Now, they distill the results of more than a decade of research into a series of engrossing and intimate case studies. Through towering piles on sofas and beds, vast mountains of paper that the hoarders "churn" but never discard, even a nest of more than two hundred cats, Frost and Steketee illuminate the pull that possessions exert on all of us. Probing the disquieting place where normal and abnormal blur, they answer the question: What happens when our stuff starts to own us? "Fascinating . . . A good mix of cultural and psychological theories on hoarding." —Newsweek Dr. Randy Frost is Professor of Psychology at Smith College and an internationally known expert on obsessive-compulsive disorder and compulsive hoarding, as well as the pathology of perfectionism. Dr. Gail Steketee is Professor and Dean at Boston University in the School of Social Work. Together they have studied hoarding for more than a decade, and published a clinical treatment manual and a self-help handbook for hoarding. They have appeared on numerous television and radio shows and given hundreds of lectures on the subject nationally and internationally.

 

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books; First Edition (January 4, 2011)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0547422555
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0547422558
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ 14 years and up
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 0.76 x 8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 out of 5 stars 900

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4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
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Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on December 30, 2013
I recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic for any reason. It covers the subject well in layman's terms, with professional evidence, which would be good for anyone personally dealing with a hoarder or studying it from a scholarly viewpoint.

One of my parents is a hoarder. I had reached my wit's end arguing and trying to make things change when I started researching into the condition of hoarding and found this title. I'm still extremely frustrated with my parent but this book has been eye opening and has helped me to change my tactics. Instead of seeing them as just "someone who loves their stuff more than they love me" I'm able to see them more objectively as a person with a mental condition who makes really bad decisions (but decisions which, in their mind, are reasonable). Because I've lived through the hurt I have to read this book very slowly, in little pieces spread out over weeks, because every chapter brings back memories of past fights. It explains hoarding mentality in a way that is clear, logical, and makes sense enough for the rest of us to relate to. For example they explain the associated "magic" that we assign to objects. Like a worn old t-shirt is just a worn old t-shirt, but let's say that shirt had been worn by some rock star you loved, you assign it some kind of "magic" value because it links you to that rock star. Everyone can relate to that reasoning but a hoarder carries it farther--assigning more "magic" to more objects and making it impossible to let go of any of them. That is just one example out of dozens. They support each point with examples from patients they have counseled.

This is a thorough book. It points out that hoarding is not the same thing as OCD even though until now the literature had classified them together. Many people with OCD also have hoarding but relatively few people who have hoarding have OCD. My parent is one such who does not have OCD but has a very severe case of hoarding. It also points out that it's more common than society thinks and is not limited to certain demographics. It's not just the poor or uneducated people who have this problem. They give examples of well educated and otherwise well adjusted people who hoard (businessmen, professors, etc). This helped me relate as well because my parent is educated (bachelor's degree) and works outside the home so having examples where it isn't just some crazy old poor hermit really helped me understand what is going on.

The authors cover how the natural reactions by friends & family members (arguing, throwing stuff away, intervention/total cleanup) are ineffective and usually only make it worse. They give suggestions on how to mitigate the problem the best you can. For example most of the hoarders they've counseled had some kind of trauma that triggered the hoarding behavior (a divorce, a miscarriage, being a victim of abuse, etc...again this holds true for my hoarder) so if you know what the trigger was you may be able to help them cope in less damaging ways. There is also a list of resources for those who want to investigate the topic deeper or connect to professional help.
43 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2012
I love to organize and will happily alphabetize a friend's CD collection or file for hours on a lovely vacation day. I also read lots of books with suggestions for storage and display, specialty books for things like organizing with ADD, and psychology texts to understand why we buy and keep the things we do. This book is different from those, because it focuses on the extreme end of the spectrum. Every one of us tends to keep stuff...maybe it's a shell collection, or old theater tickets. But as retaining items moves along the continuum, it gets to the point where the stuff owns us instead; it fills our homes, empties our wallets, destroys our social lives...not everyone is that far gone, but millions of people are affected by an intense need to cling to belongings. "Stuff" is an extremely engaging book about those people. It has lots and lots of anecdotes (which I love) and some scientific research to back up the conclusions reached by the authors. This book does not tell you what to get rid of, how to part with things, or how to organize them. It does describe the gradual slide from normal decor, hobbies and shopping, to obsessive and possessive behavior, clinging to things from gold to trash, in ways that destroy physical homes and family relationships. There's a little bit of a hoarder in all of us, and it's fascinating to read this book to see where we fit into the scheme of things.
5 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2011
I'm a retired attorney who worked with the elderly. I had at least six clients who hoarded, and in addition my own uncle, who was an active, socially connected lawyer until he died, leaving me to deal with his "important collections" that had reduced the house to narrow trails through waist-high piles of papers, shopping bags of unread books, drawers of his old watches and neckties, paintings under and on the dining room table...his mother had kept it all under some control, but after she died he could not control it himself. He considered himself the repository for "family" history as well as for his thematic art collections, and he would speak of the importance of maintaining and updating "the collections." After his death it took four giant dumpsters to clean it out, while his many friends in the community looked on with horror that I could discard these important items (he was a very popular and convincing man). One elderly client, a man, had so filled his house with junk (women's purses with broken handles; sweaters for very small dogs although he did not keep animals; books, magazines, everything, up to the ceiling--he had a narrow trail from front door to his bed, the only part of the house he could use) that the back wall had rotted and was collapsing, and because he couldn't get to the bathroom he was urinating in bottles on the lawn. After complaints from neighbors and threats of conservatorship he permitted and participated in a clean out and repairs...and not long after this event he died. An elderly woman contacted me when her adult children convinced her to move to a senior apartment so they could clean out and repair her house for rental. They had put all of her hoardings in four huge storage units, the cost of which took up all of her income--they thought that if she had to pay for the problem she might deal with it. Wrong. She insisted upon moving back to her now refurbished house, and bit by bit collected some of what was in the storage units and brought it back--so she had a totally unusable house and in addition four storage units she couldn't afford. Her four children were remarkably hostile and unforgiving--they had grown up with this and simply hated her. Other clients were elderly women with varying degrees of this problem. So...I think the book is spot on, and an excellent introduction to a very real and I think relatively widespread problem.
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Top reviews from other countries

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Juan Jose Arias
5.0 out of 5 stars Muy útil
Reviewed in Mexico on June 11, 2023
Aunque propiamente no tengas el problema de “hoarding” pero si una cantidad de cosas que dan una apariencia de desorden en casa, este libro te ayuda a descubrir rasgos de personalidad que ni te imaginabas que tenías y provocan esta acumulación. Lectura altamente recomendada que te ayuda a conocerte mas a ti mismo y como consecuencia ir transformando el aspecto de tu casa.
C Baxter
5.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive and Enlightening review of hoarder behaviours
Reviewed in Canada on July 7, 2021
I sought to understand the thinking of my sibling who has been an obvious hoarder for decades and see it worsening. This book provides the possible psychological explanations through examples, making
it very relatable. I’m off to buy the follow up: Buried In Treasures.
Harriet Hasenclever
5.0 out of 5 stars A compassionate and fascinating study
Reviewed in Germany on May 21, 2013
The book explores the deeper motives behind the hoarding of objects: objects which often do not seem to have much value in others' eyes. I don't know if a hoarder him/herself would read it but it would certainly be helpful for their friends or family to do so. It is not a quick fix "how to get rid of clutter" book. It helps one not to judge or rush in with clumsy offers of help in tidying up. The authors spent a lot of time patiently listening to the hoarders' accounts before carrying out one or two "experiments" with them in how it feels to throw away a newspaper they had been keeping, for instance, asking them after a few minutes and then again after half a day and finally, maybe, a week later so that the hoarder gradually came to realize that his or her initial panic had disappeared and that it no longer mattered, that holding onto it was unnecessary. I imagine that there are many, many people who have a touch of hoarding behaviour. Here it is described in pretty extreme cases, some almost surreal, but the calm,non-judgmental stance of the authors is admirable. A fine work.
4 people found this helpful
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Bann Cosnochta
5.0 out of 5 stars When clutter takes over the people who've collected it
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 2, 2012
The authors' use of case studies and the subjects' reasoning behind their hoarding made for interesting and at times upsetting reading. I would recommend it because the authors met people who had come to the realisation that their hoarding was causing them problems as well as those who could see no problem with what they were doing, even when it led to them being barred from their homes. They wrote about the people interviewed without ridiculing them or making excuses for a problem which was affecting more than their wallets (spouses divorcing them because of the hoarding, local authorities issuing legal proceedings for cleanups etc).
15 people found this helpful
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Amazonian
4.0 out of 5 stars Good read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 6, 2018
More for the therapist than the perpetrator, but good nonetheless.
2 people found this helpful
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