And I thought the few extra boxes of disks and the odd duplicate or non-working (it's for spares, honest) video game console that made its way into my house might be pushing it a little.

Quick way to test if you're a healthy collector or a loon: Sell a random sample on eBay -- if you get some decent cash for it you're a healthy collector. If you get no bids on eBay, it's junk.

Obviously this doesn't work so well with cats.

Or, a healthy collector likes to keep things clean and in good condition. Working condition if applicable. Items in boxes are often padded to prevent them from damaging each other. Anything that's stuffed in storage is typically wrapped well, even sealed, to prevent bugs or water ruining things.

This works even less well with cats.

Not only would it have been manageable--it may have been beneficial. I think many aberrant behaviors are vestigial. They had survival value that may not be apparent in the modern world. If the winter was cold and long, and you had only a fire and a cave, the more dead animals you dragged home the better off you were.

Edited by author 01-18-2003 07:11 PM
Cypherpunks:
The condition was probably manageable up to around the
late neolithic, where one could simply move further up
the cave, or to the next hut (the old one was leaky, anyways).

Really, what does one need to survive the modern world with
than the contents of a (small) laptop bag and an (ethanol-
detecting) credit card?


tom
-=W=-

Both this and the article on trash houses seem to try to make OCD more meaningful than what it is- a mental illness, like schitzophrenia or depression. A mental illness which has been around for generations. (and even in mythology: what about those dragons which keep everything and know where each item is? Reminds me of OCD/hoarding people I've known).

It has nothing to do with the complexity of the modern age or the overload of information. It is just a mental illness where the hoarded item is permanently associated with wellbeing in the persons brain, where the usability of a junk item seems as real as the false voices of schitzophrenia.

Depending on how bad it is it can be as dangerous as untreated Schitzophrenia or more like the melancholia of lowgrade depression.

Dangerous because it causes health and fire hazards, and if the affected is a parent, it ruins their children's childhoods (imagine never being able to invite friends over, or believing that your parent loves a pile of boxes more than you, because the boxes get more room than you do).

Like depression, if it is channeled and low grade it might help a person (depression: become a moody creator. Hoarder: become a perfect curator or collector).

But, like depression, for each one person that the depression helps there are hundreds that it hurts: for every curator there are hundreds of people with a perfect collection of garbage and newspapers, rusty metal scraps and magazines, glass jars without lids, old tangles of fishing line collected along lakeshores... and each of those hundred believes that their hoard is as valuable as a perfect set of first editions, as important as food and air to their health.

And because of this false construct value their hoard must be maintained even when it hurts their children and spouses and neighbors. Asking them to work on it is like asking them to do self-heart surgery: they might nod for a second or even agree with you, but more likely they'll attack you for attacking their very existence.

Ah yes, the hoarder article brings back memories...

Clearly the people who live in trash houses are whacked, but there is no clear line between 'healthy' and 'trash house/animal hoarder nightmare.'

There are degress of health, and obsession, and compulsion, and most of us live in the range that 'we all' consider okay. But like the 'two paychecks away from homeless' folks, most of us are one event and six months of inattention from trash house.

There is not 'them' and 'us,' but only 'us.'

when i was going to university one of the weird things i noticed in the neighborhood was a plethoria of missing cat flyers everywhere - i thought maybe a satanic cult was in the area or something - years later, a cat lady got busted - had tons of cats in her house - feces and skinny death camp kitties everywhere - they took her cats - she said she did it becuz she loved them -

and i was talking to a dude once and he tipped me off to a collector family that he knew of, living in a farm somewhere - i guess they had collected so much newspapers and such to get through the house you had to follow a tiny trail to get from room to room - and, get this, when they filled the their house up they built a new one and repeated their obsessive behavior - wish i knew where it was, take some pictures . . . .

Interesting Trivia: I have a friend who did some temp work a Major Pet Food Company helping put together some materials for focus groups concerning some new line of cat food. Apparently for people that had more than 2 cats, the data was thrown out as they did not feel this represented the "normal" cat owner and tended to skew toward crazy types that soiled even their data set!

My wife and I once pet sit for some people who had "some" cats...as they liked to put it. We found out that meant 43. I won't go in to it...but let me tell you it was the most disgusting thing I have ever experienced...

They ate six 25 pound bags of cat food a week.

It was so filthy that we took of our clothes outside before going back into our own home.

We called animal control...turns out it wasn't illegal.

Animal hoading! I almost started a blog doing nothing but aggregating these fascinating and sad stories!