punkrockhousewife asked: Related to your last question (is hoarding hereditary/familial - excellent answer, by the way): do you think hoarding has anything to do with socioeconomic status? Are members of the Depression-era “Greatest Generation,” who learned the hard way not to waste anything, hoarders or just frugal? How about people who save their kids’ old clothes in case they have another child who might need hand-me-downs? Hoarders always think they’re going to need their hoard in the future.
Thanks
Thank you for your question. I think it’s a really interesting question that gets at the core of what makes the contemporary discourse of hoarding so perplexing: hoarding seems to be figured at once as a symptom of and response to material deprivation, and as a symptom of and response to the excesses of capitalist culture. I discuss this in “Thoughts for a Monday Afternoon,” and, somewhat more obliquely, in “Is Hoarding White?” and “Is Hoarding White? (II).”
In “When Clutter Turns to Crisis,” which ran in the Boston Globe on January 10, 2010, Stephanie Schorow writes:
Hoarding is frequently seen as a problem of the elderly or a holdover from Depression-era frugality, yet the mean age of hoarders is 50, and the tendency often manifests as early as age 3, notes Randy Frost, a professor of psychology at Smith College and expert on the disorder. Compulsive hoarding affects both sexes and all economic classes.
But if compulsive hoarding affects all economic classes, it is also characterized by attitudes about money and consumption that may be at odds with capitalist culture.
In the 1993 Behaviour Research and Therapy article, “The Hoarding of Possessions,” Randy Frost and Rachel Gross write: “There was no evidence to suggest that hoarding was related to material deprivation.” But their research also suggests that though hoarding does not correspond to material deprivation, it does correspond to increased anxiety about the possibility of future deprivation. They write:
The hypothesis that hoarders are overly concerned with being without possessions when they are needed was supported by these data. For the three questions regarding ‘just-in-case’ items, hoarders were significantly different from non-hoarders. Specifically, they were more likely to buy extras in order not to run out than non-hoarders (MS = 4.6 and 3.3, respectively, t[67] = 3.14, P < 0.001). They were more likely than nonhoarders to carry ‘just-in-case’ items in their pocket or purse (MS = 4.4 and 2.5. respectively, t[67] =4.27, P < 0.001a)n d car (MS= 3.3 and 2.2, respectively, f[66] = 2.59, P < 0.05).
There was no support for the hypothesis that hoarding is related to material deprivation early in life. There were no differences in the responses to the question ‘When you were young, was there a period of time when you had very little money?, x2( I, N = 70) < 1.0, P > 0.05. There was no difference in Ss ratings of how ‘impoverished’ or ‘well-off they described their childhood, r(68) = 1.26, P > 0.05.
Compulsive hoarding seems to have less to do with material deprivation than with increased anxiety about economic contingencies.
The hoarders in my own family support this hypothesis, insofar as their relationships to money suggest not hardship, but increased anxiety, as well as a rejection of underlying consumer values. My grandmother, Fontaine, came from a wealthy family—her father was an executive at Exxon. She may have experienced some economic hardship in midlife, since she raised five children on her own after her husband’s death at 46, but she also had a small fortune in Exxon stocks.
Two poems of hers that I’ve published on this site—”Barter,” and “About Money, Cans, and Bottles,” demonstrate both remarkable frugality and her rejection of the logic of the market in favor of a more tactile understanding of value.
One of the last times I saw her was on a Christmas morning. My uncle had bought an enormous quantity of smoked salmon, and offered her some. She refused to eat any because it’s too expensive. I think for the last years of her life she subsisted almost entirely on expired food, canned tuna, Twinkies, and whatever else she could buy cheap or in bulk.
My father is also quite frugal in some ways, and resistant to conventional consumer habits. For example, I don’t think he ever uses shampoo, and instead of deodorant, he uses rubbing alcohol. I think these choices reflect his sense of irritation at the ways in which products are marketed, rather than miserliness—he is incredibly generous. When I tried to explain to him how it could be that I always end up in debt as I struggle to live on a graduate student stipend, he responded: “I get it—you’re a consumer.” Indeed, I am.
He also seems to take great pride in being frequently mistaken for a homeless person. My grandmother also appeared disheveled and overburdened—as her poem, “Bag Lady,” attests—but this seems to be symptomatic of anxieties—which in time have proved to be utterly justified—about the environment.
So there does seem to be something relating to socioeconomic status, but it also seems complicated. On the one hand, the hoarders I know reject the materialism of consumer culture, on the other hand, there is obviously an essential materialism of hoarding…
The Collyer brothers were similar in that they were incredibly frugal, but were raised as New York elite, and died with a 5th Avenue mansion whose value I can’t even begin to imagine…
More broadly, because clinical definitions of hoarding rely on the category of distress, socioeconomic factors may play a considerable role: if you have enough space and money to acquire endlessly, you can’t really be a hoarder… Or perhaps you can: in Stuff, Randy Frost and Gail Steketee describe millionaire twin brothers Jerry and Alvin:
The brothers coped with their inability to keep things organized by turning their living space into storage and simply moving into new living areas. Luckily, they had the financial means to do so. Even so, their new homes filled up so quickly that they lived in perpetually dysfunctional spaces. (206)
There is some truth, then, to the cartoon by Andy Singer that explains, “If you’re poor, it’s called hoarding” and “If you’re rich, it’s called collecting.” But the cartoon may also get at a larger question of causality: poverty cause hoarding insofar as certain behaviors are only called hoarding if done by the poor. Furthermore, money can be transformed into enough storage space to keep “clinically significant distress” at bay.
But then, as the Collyer brothers and my grandmother demonstrate, poverty itself is not always so straightforward: you can live on pennies and look like a homeless person and still have a dresser, buried under boxes and piles of newspapers, brimming with junk mail, stationary, used wrapping paper, and stock certificates…
It seems like the issue is less poverty than an understanding of value that is fundamentally at odds with capitalism: not just the choices that make me a consumer and my father not one, but the very essence of capitalism: exchange.
Thanks again for your question, and for your kind words.
Zoltana
