I’m a psychologist — here are 3 ways to tell if you’re a secret hoarder

nypost.com:

Hoarding disorder affects about 2.6% of all adults, especially those who are older than 60 and suffer from anxiety and depression.Now, Dr.

David Tolin, a clinical psychologist who is featured on the A&E series “Hoarders” — Season 15 premiered last week — is sharing three ways to tell if you are secretly a hoarder.“Hoarding disorder is a psychiatric condition that is characterized by extreme difficulty discarding or otherwise letting go of possessions,” Tolin explained to the Daily Mail in a new interview.“[This] results in the clutter building up to the point where living areas in the home are no longer usable for their intended purpose,” he continued.Hoarders get very attached to their possessions, he noted, often making their homes unlivable or unsafe.He shared three common types of attachments hoarders have to the objects they amass — sentimental, utilization-based, and aesthetic attachments.This is when a person associates a possession with a happy memory or a good person in their life — and they don’t want to let it go.“This insecure attachment to objects might be in part due to the tendency in people with compulsive hoarding problems to imbue objects with human-like qualities and to consider possessions as a part of themselves; the object becomes not just something but also someone, not just mine but also me,” wrote researchers of a 2019 study of emotional attachment to objects.“Losing such possessions might thus have greater negative consequences because it equates the loss of self or a significant other,” the researchers added.Tolin described this type of attachment as: “[Thinking an item is] very important and, ‘I’m going to need it or somebody’s going to need it, and it’s my responsibility to make sure it gets.