Hello, and welcome to the Psychology and Seattle podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Kirk Honda. I am chair of the couple and family therapy program at

Antioch University, Seattle, and I'm also a licensed therapist.

Today on the podcast, we have a special guest, Dr. Jennifer Sampson. She's gonna talk about her

specialty, which is hoarding disorder.

Tell us or introduce yourself, please first. Yeah, hi. I'm Jennifer Sampson.

I'm core faculty with you at Antioch University, and I'm also the executive director of the hoarding project.

So tell us about hoarding disorder and the hoarding project and everything you know about it.

All right, so hoarding disorder is a brand new mental health diagnosis. So two years ago, in 2013, our

the latest version of our diagnostic manual came out and in it, hoarding disorder showed up for the first time.

So prior to this, it was like non-existent in mental health, like conversation.

But a task force basically was put together to research this behavior that was really kind of surfacing in coming to public attention,

like via reality television, for instance,

in a way that these different types of behavior sort of hung together in a diagnostic kind of way.

So hoarding disorder, we define as having four main parts to it, first that there's an excessive acquisition of stuff.

So people are bringing in more things and they have space for need for or resources for.

Not everybody who hoards excessively acquires, but most people do, like 70% of people who would meet clinical criteria

for hoarding would excessively acquire. How do you define excessive?

Above their needs space or resources for stuff.

Above their needs space. So they have too much stuff given the amount of space they have.

Yeah, yeah. And so like people, and they also don't need all that stuff.

They don't need it all, right? So I mean, we all have stuff we don't need, right? Like that's fine.

But hoarding really kind of boils down to like functionality of space in a lot of ways.

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