Ginny

“Over the seven years that I chipped away at this topic, I found hoarding to be a historically intricate lattice of worry about the unsuitable roles that household furnishings, mass-produced whatnots, curiosa, keepsakes, and clutter play in our daily lives. The majority of these apprehensions over the stuff of normal life originated in the twentieth century, and they are not so far removed from other cultural anxieties. As much as a hoard might be about depression and impulsivity and loss and misplaced stacks of paper, it is also about fears of working-class blacks in 1930s Harlem, post-1960s New Christian Right literatures, and emerging models of appropriate aging in the 1940s and 1950s. Though neglected in the current rhetoric of chronic savers, these unlikely sources each fed into definitions of HD.”
― Scott Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture

“Half a decade after Frost and Gross’s “The Hoarding of Possessions,” an article in Comprehensive Psychiatry found that “the disorder belongs to a similar category of social deviance as homelessness, which does not necessarily represent mental illness.”9 In their efforts to puzzle out the phenomenon, the authors approached hoarding as less of a mental illness located in the brain and more of a socialized phenomenon located in the world-at-large—the inverse of its current reception.”
― Scott Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture

“DSM-5 pathologized those who hold on to their stuff for too long, who clutter their homes too much, who do not clean that often, and who harbor too many things. The manual labeled these activities “hoarding disorder” (HD, as it is sometimes called) and gave them an International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9-CM, to be precise) code of 300.3. Legitimized as a psychiatric disease and categorized under Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders, this diagnosis rendered unsound certain relations to certain personal property. Hoarding, it seems, had arrived.”
― Scott Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture

“Intrigued by how people became intrigued by this topic, The Hoarders is a book about how some people’s things unsettle some accepted conceptions of material culture, why documentaries, articles, and websites dedicate themselves to eradicating this activity.”
― Scott Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture