What Is Hoarding?

Hoarding Disorder is a mental health disorder.

Approximately 7% of Australians are estimated to live with Hoarding and/or Squalor issues.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) recognises H&S as a mental health disorder and is now known as either Hoarding Disorder (HD) or Severe Domestic Squalor (SDS). If a person experiences HD or SDS, a person will exhibit firm psychological, behavioural, and emotional attachments to possessions, resulting in a highly cluttered environment.

Click the DSM-5 and Diagnostic Criteria buttons below for more in-depth information.

  • ‘Hoarding Disorder is characterized by the persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of the value others may attribute to these possessions. The behaviour usually has harmful effects – emotional, physical, social, financial, and even legal – for the person suffering from the disorder and family members. For individuals who hoard the quantity of their collected items sets them apart from people with normal collecting behaviours. They accumulate a large number of possessions that often fill up or clutter active living areas of the home or workplace to the extent that their intended use is no longer possible’

    1. Persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions

    2. A perceived need to save the items

    3. Resulting in the accumulation of possessions

    4. The hoarding causes significant clinical distress or impairment in other areas of their life

    5. The hoarding is not attributed to another medical condition

    6. The hoarding is not better accounted for by the symptoms of another DSM-5 disorder

    Specify if:

    With Excessive Acquisition: if symptoms are accompanied by excessive collecting or buying or stealing of items that are not needed or for which there is no available space.

    Indicate whether hoarding beliefs and behaviours are currently characterised:

    • Good or Fair Insight: The individual recognises that hoarding–related beliefs and behaviours (pertaining to difficulty discarding items, clutter or excessive acquisition) are problematic

    • Poor Insight: The individual is mostly convinced that hoarding -related beliefs and behaviours (pertaining to difficulty discarding items, clutter or excessive acquisition) are not problematic despite evidence to the contrary

    • Absent Insight: (i.e. delusional beliefs about hoarding): The individual is completely convinced that hoarding–related beliefs and behaviours (pertaining to difficulty discarding items, clutter or excessive acquisition) are not problematic despite evidence to the contrary