Treatment varies for people with hoarding disorder

More practitioners needed in field
The problem of hoarding went relatively unnoticed as a behavioral issue until the first systematic study of the condition was published in 1993 in the journal “Behavior Research and Therapy.” Thirty years later some of the early conceptions around hoarding have been dispelled and/or modified.
Randy O. Frost, Ph.D, Harold and Elsa Siipola Israel professor emeritus of psychology, Smith College, reported that hoarding was originally interpreted as a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a concept not based on research. In the mid-1990s, he and his colleagues discovered the phenomenology of hoarding was quite different from OCD. “It did not manifest as intrusive thoughts that are interpreted catastro...