Hoarding

Originally referring to the stockpiling of gold, valuable objects, and storehouses of money, hoarding now refers to a form of material and mental deviance characterized by an individual's aberrant accumulation of things, the inability to discard these items, and the disorganization within the environment in which he or she lives. Hoarding carries negative stigma, and hoarders experience debilitating shame when they are discovered, indicating that the perceptions of others are crucial to the identification of hoarding as a form of deviance. The sociologist Howard S. Becker asserts that deviance unfolds over time, with patterns of behavior developing in sequence. A given act cannot be determined deviant without first examining the process by which the common definition of the behavior arises, what has been termed by social scientists as labeling.

[Page 330]Prior to the contemporary labeling of hoarding as a deviance, the behavior was viewed socially as an eccentricity, practiced by the wealthy, who were seen as stockpilers of inordinate amounts of material treasure. The change in public perception from hoarding as eccentricity to hoarding as deviance began with the discovery of the Collyer brothers in Harlem in 1947. As a result of an anonymous phone call to the police concerning mysterious circumstances at the home of Homer and Langley Collyer, who lived in a ramshackle mansion at 2077 Fifth Avenue in Harlem, the emaciated body of Homer was discovered amid tons of debris. Days later, under an enormous pile of old, fallen newspapers, the decaying body of Langley was discovered just a few feet from where Homer had died. Eventually, more than 100 tons of magazines, junk furniture, grand pianos, broken china, and newspapers were removed from the residence. Interest in the Collyers and their unusual lives spawned newspaper articles and books that described the brothers as exemplifiers of disorder, chaos, and filth, drawing public criticism to what was perceived as their deviant behavior and disorganized lifestyle.

The Collyer brothers were holdovers from an era when Harlem was a haven for middle- and upper-class whites during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They had purchased the mansion in 1909, expecting that the neighborhood would continue to be the same affluent residential area that it had been. However, the black migration into Harlem during the 1920s through the 1940s led to a countermigration of panicked whites out of Harlem and into the suburbs. By the mid-20th century, Harlem had become home to a largely African American population and was stereotypically viewed by much of white New York society as a slum filled with immoral people—a breeding ground for vice, crime, and other forms of deviance. Social critics at the time viewed the demographic changes in Harlem as the result of decreased influence of existing social rules of behavior on individual members of society. This emphasis on social disorganization, demoralization, and the decline of the personal life of individuals within a social group took hold in the media and popular culture, quickly propelling sociologists to label hoarding as a social deviance. Social workers and psychiatrists began to medicalize hoarding as an impulse control disorder like kleptomania, pyromania, and compulsive shopping, even strongly suggesting that hoarding be considered a category of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD).

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