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This is Later with Lee Matthews,
the Lee Matthews Podcast more what you hear

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weekday afternoons on the Drive. It's
been a topic that has been very interesting

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to me. I'll get into why
coming up and coming up. Hoarders is

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returning for its all new season on
A and E to be Amazon Prime and

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Netflix of that series. Doctor David
Tolan is with as founder and director of

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the Anxiety Disorder Centers and Institute of
Living, an author of over two hundred

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scientific journal articles. Greetings doctor,
good to have you along. Thanks Lee,

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thanks for having me. Hope your
life is not too cluttered Likewise,

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Likewise, I'm working on it,
as I think we all are well.

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The people that you deal with in
Hoarders on A and E and the other

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channels, these are people who have
taken collecting to a point where it's dangerous

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for their lives. Yeah. Yeah. What we need to kind of recognize

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is that this is a mental health
problem in which the person's behavior has spiraled

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out of control. And in that
way we can think of it as a

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little bit analogous to a drinking problem
or a drug problem. I'm not necessarily

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saying they're biologically the same thing.
But if we think about something that maybe

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lots of us could be vulnerable to
spiraling out of control and getting worse and

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worse until you eventually reach some catastrophic
point where your life is starting to fall

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apart. That's kind of what we're
seeing with hoarding disorder. And this affects

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a lot of people. I mean, it's a very common condition. This

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is one of the things that really
kind of struck me when I started working

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with hoarding was I would give talks
about it and people would start coming up

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to me and saying, well,
I know somebody who has this problem.

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You know, my mom has this
problem, my neighbor has this problem.

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And I wasn't hearing that with a
lot of the other mental health issues that

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I might talk about. So this
got me really thinking, you know,

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this is a very common issue that
touches a lot of people. Well there's

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a difference. Now. I had
grandparents who were depression era children, and

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they were frugal. I wouldn't say
they were hoarders. They were frugal.

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They saved things. My grandmother drying
out Kleenex underneath a lamp. Okay,

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well, that's because when she was
a child, getting a Kleenex was something

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big, and you hulm onto that, not running the water, you know,

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going ahead and stepping into the cold
shower before it heated up, because

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you were saving water, all right. That's different than my wife's grandparents,

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on the other hand, who would
grab a hold of anything they found and

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save it. It didn't matter if
it was an old piece of golf ball

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found on the street, a broken
fan belt, ooh great. My wife's

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grandfather would grab that and save it
in a bucket, and he had buckets

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of them all through his garage.
Yeah. Yeah, And I think you're

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onto something really important, which is
this is not, for example, collecting

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mm hmmm. And this is not
Great Depression or kinds of behavior. I

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mean, if it is a poverty
behavior, it's a very unhelpful poverty behavior.

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I mean, if you sort of
think about the Great Depression, Sure,

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times were very tight. People didn't
have a lot of money, so

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it would make sense that you would
save and take care of your possessions.

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But that's not what we see in
hoarding disorder. In hoarding disorder, much

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of the time, what we see
is that the stuff is kind of strewn

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around the house and it's not being
well cared for, and it's being allowed

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to deteriorate and fall apart. So
you know, it's almost like they got

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the first part right, which is
saving, but they didn't get the second

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part, which is also take care
of those things. And so you know,

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if you watch the show Hoarders,
what you see is that a lot

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of the stuff we're pulling out,
there is some good stuff in the house

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usually, but a lot of the
stuff we're pulling out is just stuff that

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most of us would consider to be
junk. Talking to our good friend doctor

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David Tolin, who is a host
of A and E's Hoarders, which is

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in its new season on A and
E to be Amazon Prime and Netflix,

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and is this something that is new
or is this a condition that has always

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existed It was just one of those
idiosyncrasies people had. I think this has

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always been with us, And in
fact, if you look at the old

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literature, you can find case reports
of people talking about you know what certainly

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sounds like it could be hoarding,
going as far back as the seventeen hundreds.

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So I think that this has been
around for a long time, but

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we've only really recognized it and been
studying it for about a decade. It

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wasn't until twenty thirteen that the American
Psychiatric Association finally came up with a diagnosis

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of hoarding disorder and put it in
their Big Book of diagnoses. Before then,

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you know, people if they thought
about hoarding at all, we sort

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of thought of it as maybe an
offshoot of obsessive compulsive disorder, which now

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in retrospect we realize was not true
at all. But you know, we

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sort of informally thought of it that
way, but it just became increasingly clear

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this is its own issue, and
this is its own problem that really does

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need to be recognized and independently studied. Have you seen an uptick in this

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condition or perhaps development of this condition
in people since the pandemic. I don't

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know. And and the reason that
I don't know that is nobody's done that

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study yet. What we do know
is that hoarding tends to be very It

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tends to creep up on a person, So it tends not to be something

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that just hits you all at once. Rather, this is happening incrementally,

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often over a period of years or
even decades. And so when when you

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look at the course of hoarding disorder. Interestingly, I mean, it's easy

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to think of older people when we
think of hoarding, and certainly it does

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disproportionately affect older people. But when
you talk to people with hoarding, most

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of them say, I've been doing
this since I was a kid. I've

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been I've been this way at least
since adolescence. But what's happened is as

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I've gotten older, and maybe as
my support system has shrunk, the behavior

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has gotten worse and worse. And
now that I'm in middle age or later,

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now I've gotten to the point where
the problem is taking over. Doctor

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David Tolan. He is the host
of as Hoarders, which is in its

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new season. I asked that question
because since the pandemic, my lovely wife

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and I have been going round and
round about a few things. When she

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goes to the grocery store now she
buys always extra toilet paper, always extra

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paper, towels, and it's to
the point where, Okay, we don't

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have space to store this stuff.
And I tell her, Honey, I

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love you for wanting to be prepared, but it's a storage issue. It

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is not right now. Just now, imagine taking that phenomenon and cranking it

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all the way up to ten,
so that it's not just toilet paper and

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paper towels, but it's sort of
like everything. I don't want it to

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become that, right, And you
can certainly see how easy it is for

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this behavioral behavior to spiral out of
control. And that's exactly what happens in

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hoarding disorder, you know, and
and it is it is very easy,

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I think, to stigmatize mental illness. And I think if you especially you

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know, if you watch hoarding,
it it's very easy to stigmatize hoarding as

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reflecting, say something bad about the
person's character, like they're lazy or they're

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a slob, And of course this
isn't true. We really do need to

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recognize this is a mental health problem. It's a behavioral problem. The behavior

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has spiraled out of control, and
these people need our help, and they

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need our support, not our judgment. And that's what I what ended up.

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We compromised. Okay, if you
must buy these bales of paper towel

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and we have no place to store
them, we will keep them temporarily in

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the back of your car until we
need them. And she seems happy with

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them, and yeah, you know, and that's and often that's the sort

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of compromise that we end up making, right. I mean, even when

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you get into the severe hoarding,
it's probably not realistic for us to think

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you're never gonna hoard again. Yeah, yeah, that's probably you know,

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pie in the sky. But what
we can do is figure out some compromises.

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How can we get you to retain
some of your stuff because I know

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it makes you feel better to have
it, but not in a way that's

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self destructive. So what you and
your wife have done is really if you

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just amp it up that that's actually
not too far off from a lot of

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the stuff that we do with hoarding
Hoarders. It is in its new season

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on A and E to be Amazon
Prime and Netflix and doctor David Tolan is

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the host, and I thank you
for you can tell I could talk all

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day about this, doctor, and
thank you for joining us. Hey,

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thanks a lot, LEI. Thanks
for listening to Later with Lee Matthews,

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the Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember
to listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons

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from five to seven and iHeartMedia Presentation