内容简介
We've seen them in a Dateline story or an Oprah feature: homesthat have become improbable repositories of - literally - tons ofstuff. The camera crews zoom in on rooms crammed floor-to-ceilingwith stacks of newspapers and magazines. We watch, fascinated, asprofessional organizers attack the untidy rooms, or the hostexpresses horror at a filthy kitchen, but never ask the largerquestion: How did it come to this? STUFF is the first book toexplore compulsive hoarding, a disorder that affects as many as sixmillion people. Using the latest research, much of which theypioneered in their decade of study, along with vivid case historiesof a range of hoarders (animal collectors, compulsive shoppers,elderly packrats, scavengers), Frost and Steketee describe thevarious causes of hoarding - psychological and biological--and thetraits by which you can identify a hoarder. In a portrait thatdisproves many of our assumptions about the often-hidden disease(for example, most hoarders aren't reacting to childhood poverty ordeprivation), they also examine the forces behind a hoarder'sbehavior and the ways in which they affect all of us, whether it'sthe passion of a collector, the rigor of someone whose desk isalways clean, the sentimentality of the person who saves ticketstubs. For the sufferers, their relatives and friends, and all therest of us with complicated relationships to our things, STUFFanswers the question of what happens when our stuff starts to ownus.