By Randy Frost, 2010

ISBN 015101423X

We've seen them in a Dateline story or an Oprah feature: homes that have become improbable repositories of literally tons of stuff. The camera crews zoom in on rooms crammed floor-to-ceiling with stacks of newspapers and magazines. We watch, fascinated, as professional organizers attack the untidy rooms, or the host expresses horror at a filthy kitchen, but never ask the larger question: How did it come to this? STUFF is the first book to explore compulsive hoarding, a disorder that affects as many as six million people.

Using the latest research, much of which they pioneered in their decade of study, along with vivid case histories of a range of hoarders (animal collectors, compulsive shoppers, elderly packrats, scavengers), Frost and Steketee describe the various causes of hoarding psychological and biological and the traits by which you can identify a hoarder. In a portrait that disproves many of our assumptions about the often-hidden disease (for example, most hoarders aren't reacting to childhood poverty or deprivation), they also examine the forces behind a hoarder s behavior and the ways in which they affect all of us, whether it s the passion of a collector, the rigor of someone whose desk is always clean, the sentimentality of the person who saves ticket stubs. About the Author Dr.

Randy Frost is Professor of Psychology at Smith College and an internationally known expert on obsessive-compulsive disorder and compulsive hoarding, as well as the pathology of perfectionism. Dr. Gail Steketee is Professor and Acting Dean at Boston University in the School of Social Work.

on obsessive-compulsive disorder and compulsive hoarding, as well as the pathology of perfectionism. Dr. Gail Steketee is Professor and Acting Dean at Boston University in the School of Social Work.

Together they have studied hoarding for more than a decade, and published a clinical treatment manual and a self-help handbook for hoarding. They have appeared on numerous television and radio shows and given hundreds of lectures on the subject nationally and internationally.

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