Hoarders just can't let go

The things she bought included clothes she never wore, exercise benches she never used and scores of stuffed animals that watched over this growing accumulation with an air of friendly detachment.

Before the things ended up in five large storage pods they filled the woman's house from floor to ceiling and nearly wall to wall. The entryway of the house was once so full of stuff that when her daughter was nine months pregnant she couldn't open the door wide enough to get in.

Eventually, before the woman's family took the things away, the woman had gone through hundreds of thousands of dollars in inheritances, spending it on roasters and vacuum cleaners and computer printers and Marie Osmond dolls whose boxes she never opened.

This past weekend, some of these things were sold at an estate sale. The remaining items will be sold at another sale in January, with the hope of raising enough money so her children can take care of her for the rest of her life.

According to her daughter, at one time the woman ranked No. 2 in deliveries from the Salt Lake area UPS. Maybe, the daughter says, the attention from the UPS driver was part of the thrill of her mother's endless shopping spree. Or maybe her mother liked talking to the encouraging operators at the 1-800 number for the QVC home shopping channel.

But it wasn't just the buying, it was also the having. The woman had stacks and stacks of newspapers and mail. Like other people who hoard, she had trouble getting rid of the things in her life.

Her daughter wonders if compulsive shopping and hoarding might be a growing phenomenon, because every time she mentions it to someone, the response is something like "I have an aunt who does that" or "my dad divorced my mom because she wouldn't get off e-Bay."

Hoarding is a form of obsessive compulsive disorder, explains Salt Lake therapist Suze Harrington. Sometimes the hoarders also have another form of OCD, such as excessive hand washing, or sometimes they'll just be hoarders. If they can afford to buy something they'll often buy one in every color. If they can't afford to shop, they'll accumulate newspapers or stray cats or the paper sleeves from coffee cups.

One of Harrington's patients collected so many soda pop cans they filled up her bathtub and oven and every floor in her house. Each can still held a few drops of soda, so that led to bugs, and eventually the woman was evicted from her apartment.