What Causes a Person to Be a Hoarder?
- Hoarding Causes
- What causes hoarding?
- What Is Hoarding?
- What is hoarding?
- Heart
- Why Does a Person Become a Hoarder? Center
What causes hoarding?
Hoarding is a severe psychological disorder where a person gathers an excessive number of items and stores them. The reasons someone become a hoarder include altered brain connections, genetics, stress, OCD, ecology factors and altered levels of serotonin.
Doctors point to several potential causes for a person to become a hoarder.
- Contradistinct brain connections: Studies showed that abnormal brain development and brain lesions could atomic number 82 to compulsive behaviors of hoarding. Sometimes, hoarding may begin after brain damage due to surgery, stroke, brain injury or infections. Compulsive hoarding is often seen in individuals who have autistic spectrum disorder or attention arrears hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
- Serotonin and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD): Research showed that the chemical serotonin seems to play a office in OCD. It is a chemical that the encephalon uses to transmit information. Altered serotonin levels may play a role in compulsive hoarding as well. Hoarders may develop the condition much afterwards in life. In improver, hoarders have less awareness that their condition is abnormal compared to patients with OCD.
- Hereditary: As per inquiry, up to 85 percent of people with compulsive hoarding usually proper name at least one other family member who has this problem. Hoarders may also have grown upward in cluttered homes themselves and derive comfort from the clutter.
- Ecology conditions: Those who have faced early on deprivation may develop hoarding equally a coping mechanism later in life. This can exist usually found on psychological exam of the patient.
- Stressful life events: Stressful life events such as a divorce or death of a loved 1 may trigger hoarding behavior.
Other mental wellness conditions such equally social phobia or fear of social interactions, bipolar disorder, specific phobias or fears, anxiety and depression may give rise to compulsive hoarding behavior. Commonly, hoarders may endure from loneliness, substance abuse or alcohol dependence.
What is hoarding?
Hoarding is a severe psychological disorder. Hoarding is a disorder where a person gathers an excessive number of items and stores them. This is usually in a cluttered mode and results in unmanageable amounts of clutter. Hoarding can take a huge impact on a person's power to part independently and can behave a high level of risk for themselves and others. It can cause high levels of distress for those who live with a hoarder or who are shut to a person who hoards. It can crusade difficulties for communities working with people who hoard. Signs of a hoarding disorder may include
- Keeping or collecting items that may have trivial or no monetary value
- Finding information technology difficult to categorize or organize items
- Having difficulties making decisions
- Struggling to manage everyday tasks, such as cooking, cleaning and paying bills
- Condign attached to items and refusing to let anyone touch or borrow them
- Having poor relationships with family or friends
Treatment options: There is no cure for obsessive-compulsive hoarding, but in that location are ways to assist the hoarder and help them transition effectively to more than healthy behaviors.
Medications
- Antidepressant medications (that increase the levels of serotonin in the encephalon) have been shown in research studies to lead to improvements in some compulsive hoarders.
- Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), a form of antidepressants, are most ordinarily used to treat hoarding.
- Research involving paroxetine (Paxil), an SSRI, has shown that it may better hoarding symptoms every bit well as other obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) symptoms.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy
- Medication alone cannot hope to treat the underlying behavior. For this, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) may be more than effective.
- CBT is more than just talk therapy. Information technology goes across talking with the therapist. The therapist often visits the hoarder's home and helps them to call up more clearly virtually their possessions and learn to make decisions most them.
- CBT helps patients to
- Gradually confront things they fearfulness to experience less afraid.
- Larn healthier ways to cope with stressful situations.
- Become aware of and subsequently change how they think in critical situations.
Individual and group therapy sessions are bachelor. In improver, intensive daily outpatient therapy may be recommended for certain individuals.
Hoarding disorder may be hard for families and friends to sympathise and manage, specially if the person does not recognize that they have a problem with their hoarding. It may crusade distress for families and present questions on how all-time to help. Some helpful ideas include
- Encourage the person to seek professional treatment.
- Effort to learn as much as yous can about the status.
- Avoid going into their home or personal space and throwing things away without discussing it with them commencement. This may cause great distress for the person. Endeavor to discuss it with them showtime and, if no agreement is reached, do not have information technology upon yourself to clear their clutter.
- Admit their fears of losing their possessions and the changes they volition have to make during handling.
- Be realistic with expectations. Don't expect besides much besides apace.
- Seek support for yourself, whether speaking to a mental health professional person or attending a support group.
Medically Reviewed on 3/5/2021
References
Medscape Medical Reference
American Psychiatric Association
Source: https://www.medicinenet.com/why_does_a_person_become_a_hoarder/article.htm