Paper Hoarding is one among many types of hoarding disorders. This kind of hoarding situation involves accumulation of every single paper – be it newspaper, magazine, invoices, bills, letters and much more.
Paper Hoarders generally do not categories the papers they hoard. Most of them find categorizing, a boring activity. They just dump it in a drawer or some box hoping that it would prove helpful in the near future. They feel that if they discard those papers, they will lose out on something really important.
Hoarding one kind of thing and then another, ultimately leads them to end up piling everything. A situation arises where you cannot move around in the houses due to these hoardings. The piles of newspapers, magazines etc. take up so much place, that movement as well as a room’s usability is affected.
Paper Hoarders have answers to all questions that you shoot at them. For example:
If suppose the hoarder is hoarding newspapers and you ask the reason behind it, he might say that the newspaper contains a delicious recipe. You might wonder why s/he is keeping the entire newspaper and suggest him to cut it out the required article. S/He will find some other reason to keep the newspaper like there is a funny comic strip or an informative article etc., citing ‘n’ number of reasons to keep the newspaper. S/He will not give up on it easily. It is found that paper hoarders sometimes indulge in thievery. Books borrowed from the libraries or friends, are usually not returned. The only thought in their mind is the doubt whether s/he will be able to borrow it again, sometime in future.
Any house hoarded with paper is an eye sore, giving a shabby look. There is a risk that the hoarder might end up in hurting himself. His place will serve as a home to many rodents and insects. Mould too can also grow up in such places. Fire breakout is also one among the concerns. It’s not just the house, but relationships too suffer.
De-cluttering becomes really difficult for these hoarders. The hoarder will be much attached to the magazines, newspapers, letters, bank statements, gift-wraps etc. Giving up on it may be hard, but worth it.
