This is Later with Lee Matthews, the Lee Matthews Podcast more what you hear
weekday afternoons on the Drive. It's been a topic that has been very interesting
to me. I'll get into why coming up and coming up. Hoarders is
returning for its all new season on A and E to be Amazon Prime and
Netflix of that series. Doctor David Tolan is with as founder and director of
the Anxiety Disorder Centers and Institute of Living, an author of over two hundred
scientific journal articles. Greetings doctor, good to have you along. Thanks Lee,
thanks for having me. Hope your life is not too cluttered Likewise,
Likewise, I'm working on it, as I think we all are well.
The people that you deal with in Hoarders on A and E and the other
channels, these are people who have taken collecting to a point where it's dangerous
for their lives. Yeah. Yeah. What we need to kind of recognize
is that this is a mental health problem in which the person's behavior has spiraled
out of control. And in that way we can think of it as a
little bit analogous to a drinking problem or a drug problem. I'm not necessarily
saying they're biologically the same thing. But if we think about something that maybe
lots of us could be vulnerable to spiraling out of control and getting worse and
worse until you eventually reach some catastrophic point where your life is starting to fall
apart. That's kind of what we're seeing with hoarding disorder. And this affects
a lot of people. I mean, it's a very common condition. This
is one of the things that really kind of struck me when I started working
with hoarding was I would give talks about it and people would start coming up
to me and saying, well, I know somebody who has this problem.
You know, my mom has this problem, my neighbor has this problem.
And I wasn't hearing that with a lot of the other mental health issues that
I might talk about. So this got me really thinking, you know,
this is a very common issue that touches a lot of people. Well there's
a difference. Now. I had grandparents who were depression era children, and
they were frugal. I wouldn't say they were hoarders. They were frugal.
They saved things. My grandmother drying out Kleenex underneath a lamp. Okay,
well, that's because when she was a child, getting a Kleenex was something
big, and you hulm onto that, not running the water, you know,
going ahead and stepping into the cold shower before it heated up, because
you were saving water, all right. That's different than my wife's grandparents,
on the other hand, who would grab a hold of anything they found and
save it. It didn't matter if it was an old piece of golf ball
found on the street, a broken fan belt, ooh great. My wife's
grandfather would grab that and save it in a bucket, and he had buckets
of them all through his garage. Yeah. Yeah, And I think you're
onto something really important, which is this is not, for example, collecting
mm hmmm. And this is not Great Depression or kinds of behavior. I
mean, if it is a poverty behavior, it's a very unhelpful poverty behavior.
I mean, if you sort of think about the Great Depression, Sure,
times were very tight. People didn't have a lot of money, so
it would make sense that you would save and take care of your possessions.
But that's not what we see in hoarding disorder. In hoarding disorder, much
of the time, what we see is that the stuff is kind of strewn
around the house and it's not being well cared for, and it's being allowed
to deteriorate and fall apart. So you know, it's almost like they got
the first part right, which is saving, but they didn't get the second
part, which is also take care of those things. And so you know,
if you watch the show Hoarders, what you see is that a lot
of the stuff we're pulling out, there is some good stuff in the house
usually, but a lot of the stuff we're pulling out is just stuff that
most of us would consider to be junk. Talking to our good friend doctor
David Tolin, who is a host of A and E's Hoarders, which is
in its new season on A and E to be Amazon Prime and Netflix,
and is this something that is new or is this a condition that has always
existed It was just one of those idiosyncrasies people had. I think this has
always been with us, And in fact, if you look at the old
literature, you can find case reports of people talking about you know what certainly
sounds like it could be hoarding, going as far back as the seventeen hundreds.
So I think that this has been around for a long time, but
we've only really recognized it and been studying it for about a decade. It
wasn't until twenty thirteen that the American Psychiatric Association finally came up with a diagnosis
of hoarding disorder and put it in their Big Book of diagnoses. Before then,
you know, people if they thought about hoarding at all, we sort
of thought of it as maybe an offshoot of obsessive compulsive disorder, which now
in retrospect we realize was not true at all. But you know, we
sort of informally thought of it that way, but it just became increasingly clear
this is its own issue, and this is its own problem that really does
need to be recognized and independently studied. Have you seen an uptick in this
condition or perhaps development of this condition in people since the pandemic. I don't
know. And and the reason that I don't know that is nobody's done that
study yet. What we do know is that hoarding tends to be very It
tends to creep up on a person, So it tends not to be something
that just hits you all at once. Rather, this is happening incrementally,
often over a period of years or even decades. And so when when you
look at the course of hoarding disorder. Interestingly, I mean, it's easy
to think of older people when we think of hoarding, and certainly it does
disproportionately affect older people. But when you talk to people with hoarding, most
of them say, I've been doing this since I was a kid. I've
been I've been this way at least since adolescence. But what's happened is as
I've gotten older, and maybe as my support system has shrunk, the behavior
has gotten worse and worse. And now that I'm in middle age or later,
now I've gotten to the point where the problem is taking over. Doctor
David Tolan. He is the host of as Hoarders, which is in its
new season. I asked that question because since the pandemic, my lovely wife
and I have been going round and round about a few things. When she
goes to the grocery store now she buys always extra toilet paper, always extra
paper, towels, and it's to the point where, Okay, we don't
have space to store this stuff. And I tell her, Honey, I
love you for wanting to be prepared, but it's a storage issue. It
is not right now. Just now, imagine taking that phenomenon and cranking it
all the way up to ten, so that it's not just toilet paper and
paper towels, but it's sort of like everything. I don't want it to
become that, right, And you can certainly see how easy it is for
this behavioral behavior to spiral out of control. And that's exactly what happens in
hoarding disorder, you know, and and it is it is very easy,
I think, to stigmatize mental illness. And I think if you especially you
know, if you watch hoarding, it it's very easy to stigmatize hoarding as
reflecting, say something bad about the person's character, like they're lazy or they're
a slob, And of course this isn't true. We really do need to
recognize this is a mental health problem. It's a behavioral problem. The behavior
has spiraled out of control, and these people need our help, and they
need our support, not our judgment. And that's what I what ended up.
We compromised. Okay, if you must buy these bales of paper towel
and we have no place to store them, we will keep them temporarily in
the back of your car until we need them. And she seems happy with
them, and yeah, you know, and that's and often that's the sort
of compromise that we end up making, right. I mean, even when
you get into the severe hoarding, it's probably not realistic for us to think
you're never gonna hoard again. Yeah, yeah, that's probably you know,
pie in the sky. But what we can do is figure out some compromises.
How can we get you to retain some of your stuff because I know
it makes you feel better to have it, but not in a way that's
self destructive. So what you and your wife have done is really if you
just amp it up that that's actually not too far off from a lot of
the stuff that we do with hoarding Hoarders. It is in its new season
on A and E to be Amazon Prime and Netflix and doctor David Tolan is
the host, and I thank you for you can tell I could talk all
day about this, doctor, and thank you for joining us. Hey,
thanks a lot, LEI. Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews,
the Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons
from five to seven and iHeartMedia Presentation