Are you a hoarder? The USU psychology department wants to help

Utah State University’s Department of Psychology is conducting a study to determine if a self-help website could help people with hoarding disorder. 

Doctoral student researcher Jennifer Krafft said the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Research Group started taking participants in February 2020 and will continue accepting participants until they wrap up in the fall. 

According to Krafft, the study is open to anyone in the United States who shows hoarding symptoms. 

Krafft described hoarding problems as rigid ways of thinking about belongings, like buying into worries that discarding something will be wasteful or a mistake. She said about 1.5 to six percent of people meet criteria for hoarding disorder.

“People with hoarding problems have lower quality of life and it can really affect their physical and mental health,” she said. “And despite how common and serious it is, we don’t know that much about how to treat hoarding.”

Krafft said the goal of the study is to find a short-term, efficient way to help people live more meaningful and healthy lives. Normally, treatment can take 20 weeks, but the website is supposed to only take eight. The website teaches a series of psychological skills, including mindfulness, acceptance of emotions and connecting with personal values to help people with hoarding problems overcome barriers.

“If using a self-help website for eight weeks makes a difference, we can get good help to people with hoarding problems who might not otherwise have access,” she said. “Also, while we know skills like mindfulness and acceptance are helpful for mental health in general, they haven’t been tested for hoarding very much, so we want to see if this is a useful set of skills to teach for hoarding specifically.”

Michael Levin, Ph.D., one of the leaders of the ACT Research Group, said the website used in the study is a version of a website the group used in fall 2019. He said the new program is called Making Space. 

“This website will walk people through a set of skills to learn new ways of responding to their thoughts and feelings, including those related to their possessions,” he said. “They will learn how to get unstuck from unhelpful struggles with their thoughts and feelings, how to notice their thoughts as just thoughts, and how to open up to difficult emotions.”

Levin said he hopes people will use the website to receive therapy at their own pace, whenever and wherever they want. 

“If we find the program is helpful in the ways we are expecting, we will continue to offer it to the public as part of our suite of ACT Guide self-help programs,” he said. “Especially with all of the challenges with the pandemic, it’s really important to find new ways to help people cope and learn how to improve their mental health.”

Krafft added that one reason her group wanted to study this disorder was because of the stigma around hoarding. 

“Much of what people know about hoarding in the general public is based on reality TV portrayals, which play to the extremes,” she said. “That can make it really hard for people to get help, because just acknowledging having a hoarding problem can feel very painful or embarrassing.”

The website, Krafft said, has resources to help people navigate self-judgement and shame without letting it control them.

“I’d also encourage people to be aware that hoarding disorder is a mental health problem like any other,” she said. “Having compassion and understanding is really essential.”

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