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SYLLOGOMANIA
Unnecessary hoarding of possessions is known as syllogomania. Alternative names for syllogomania are compulsive hoarding syndrome, disposophobia, or Collyer brothers syndrome. “Syllogomania” roughly means out-of-control collecting.
Every so often the media will report a case of someone who lives among piles of old newspapers, tin cans, or other items regarded by everyone else as junk. They can barely move within their own living space. The conventional view is that compulsive hoarders, collectors, or “clutterers” suffer from a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).
Hoarding is seen in 18 to 42 per cent of OCD patients. But hoarding is also seen in patients with anorexia nervosa, dementia, and psychotic disorders. Hoarding is found in geriatric populations more often than in younger groups. There is significant distress or impairment in normal living caused by the hoarding. Severe self-neglect is also seen as a possible consequence.
Dr. Gail Steketee from Boston University and Dr. Randy Frost from Smith College write in the December 2003 issue of CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY REVIEW that hoard “can result in serious and even life-threatening pathology” and that the “severity appears to increase with age”.
Hoarding may be very difficult to treat, especially if the hoarder does not see any problem in their behavior. Hoarders are known to be indecisive to the point of being unable to change their behavior even when they recognize that something might be wrong.
Hoarding may be a natural and adaptive instinct somehow gone amok. Hoarding may involve any category of objects. However, animals, books, newspapers, building materials, are high on the list of “things often hoarded”. Animal hoarders often believe that they are providing an excellent environment for the many animals they keep. However, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals provides a “Hoarding Prevention Team” which works with hoarders whenever they are found within the U.S. Recent theories claim that hoarding may be more biologically driven than psychological.
* There could be a genetic or modeling effect involved in hoarding. According to Dr. Frost, hoarders tend to have a close family member who also hoards.
* Abnormalities of the brain may be involved. According to Dr. Sanjaya Saxena, a psychiatrist at UCLA, brain scans reveal that hoarders have lower activity in the cingulated gyrus of the brain. This is an area of the brain known to be involved in attention-focusing and decision-making.
* Brain damage may be involved. According to a study by a team of researchers led by Dr. Steven Anderson, a neurologist at the University of Iowa, hoarding developed in patients suffering damage to the prefrontal cortex after a stroke, surgery, or encephalitis. This region of the brain is involved in information processing, behavioral organization, and decision-making. The specific region of the brain is a tiny area called the right mesial prefrontal cortex.
* Dr. Anderson and colleagues have studied brain function in animals that have a highly developed hoarding instinct. Such animals continue to store no matter how much they accumulate.
* Some experts believe that hoarding is poorly defined and may have different causes in different patients. According to Dr. T. Maier, a psychiatrist at the Zurich University Hospital in Switzerland, writing in ACTA PSYCHIATRICA SCANDINAVIA, “the notion obviously lacks a consistent definition . . . the condition needs to be evaluated carefully in every particular case . . . .”
* Hoarding sufferers are nearly three times as likely to be overweight or obese compared with family members.
* Dr. D.F. Tolin and colleagues from The Institute of Living of the Hartford Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut report in the August 2008 PSYCHIATRY RESEARCH that about 10 per cent of hoarding sufferers have been evicted or threatened with eviction from their place of residence due to their hoarding.
* The “bowerbird symptom” is a term for compulsive hoarding coined by Dr. Paul Fitzgerald now at the Alfred Psychiatry Research Centre at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. The bowerbird is a native Australian bird world famous for its hoarding habits.
Perhaps the most famous case of hoarders is that of the Collyer brothers of New York City. In this tragic case, syllogomania reached a twice fatal degree. Homer Collyer (1881-1947) and his younger brother Langley (1885-1947) lived for decades as quiet, unemployed, rarely-seen men at 2078 Fifth Avenue (at the corner of 128th Street) in Manhattan.
They were the sons of a noted opera singer mother and a wealthy gynaecologist. They grew up in a luxurious, twelve-room, brownstone mansion. They were educated at Columbia University where Homer became a lawyer and Langley an engineer. Langley was also a talented pianist. No one knows why they became hermits and compulsive hoarders but became compulsive hoarders they did!
When their mother died in the 1920s, they boarded up their home as their hoarding behaviour strangely and seriously escalated. Over more than two decades, the Collyer brothers collected 14 grand pianos, stuffed rats, a Model T Ford chassis, dressmaking dummies, chandeliers, bicycles, clocks, and an impressive cache of weapons and ammunition.
They maintained narrow paths through teetering mountains of rubbish. They devised an intricate system of bobby traps that would topple towers of rubbish on top of intruders. (Why anyone would steal such “treasures” is anyone’s guess!)
Neighbours gossiped about the two strange brothers and rumours about their true nature of their activity were constant. Homer eventually became blind and bedridden with arthritis and was cared for by Langley.
In March of 1947, while carrying a meal to his brother, Langley accidentally sprang one of the booby traps and was crushed to death. A few days later and unable to survive alone, Homer suffered a fatal heart attack.
By the time the police finally found them, they had been dead for weeks. The rats that had infested their home had feasted on their bodies. As Frank Lidz writes in GHOSTLY MEN: THE STRANGE BUT TRUE STORY OF THE COLLYER BROTHERS, NEW YORK’S GREATEST HOARDERS (2003), the Collyer brothers are enshrined in history as martyrs to junk.
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