The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture

This well-argued study of so-called hoarders and their relationship with modern material culture asks for a second opinion on the recent identification of "hoarding disorder" in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) as a type of psychopathology. Herring explores the demonization of hoarding in contemporary culture using four "genealogies" as his foundation: the infamous Collyer brothers, whose deaths-by-refuse prefigured "hoarding disorder"; Andy Warhol, whose Manhattan townhouse was found piled with art and kitsch after his 1987 death; professional organizer and lifestyle counselor Sandra Felton; and Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edith, whose trash-filled East Hampton home became the subject of feature articles, documentary films, and a Broadway musical. Building on the work of others, Herring submits that accounts of hoarding incite an "object panic" in non-hoarders, who stigmatize it as unsanitary and unsafe, and who collapse "the distinction between overfurnished rooms and demented headspace." Herring digests a considerable amount of sociological, psychological, and scientific research into an engrossing and accessible exploration. If, as he posits, "hoarding is more social apprehension than neurological irregularity," then readers may well agree with him that "hoarding is in the heads of those who fret about the disease as much as the individual herself." (Nov.)