People with hoarding behaviours (PwHB) need to be able to access a range of support options in a timely manner for their own wellbeing as well as that of friends and family. In response to recent calls to understand more about support groups and the role of peers in relation to hoarding, we investigate an online forum for PwHB.

To explore the types of messages exchanged on the popular online discussion platform Reddit and the sort of information and support that is available.

We randomly scraped 100 threads from a hoarding subreddit or subcommunity on Reddit and undertook a thematic analysis of the 1297 individual messages collected.

The analysis produced three themes: Emotional and practical support for help seekers; Seeking help on behalf of others; and Practical problems with discarding. The forum provides a place for exchanging emotional and practical support where posters detail their lived experience of practical strategies for reducing their ‘hoard’. Progress updates provide a sense of continued connection and posters seeking advice on behalf of someone else are welcomed and supported. The forum exposes debate and frustration around the practicalities and ethics of disposing of items, highlighting additional obstacles for PwHB and the limitations of geographically dispersed support groups.

The online forum provides both opportunities and challenges for PwHB. The type of content exchanged within the online forum helps us better understand support issues for PwHB and points to clinical implications for therapy.

The beliefs about their items held by those experiencing hoarding disorder (HD) have been conceptualised as motivating and perpetuating factors.

This paper presents a measure named Beliefs about Items in Hoarding Disorder: designed to identify the presence and strength of beliefs about their items in HD to aid routine assessment and formulation.

Participants (n=226) who met the clinical threshold for HD completed a battery of questionnaire items based on previous measures of cognition in hoarding and qualitative research into beliefs held by people with HD about their items, which were subsequently analysed using factor analysis to refine the tool for clinical use.

The findings of the analysis indicated three factors: items create emotional attachment and safety, items represent parts of me and my life, and items are useful and should not be wasted.

This new measure, Beliefs about Items in Hoarding Disorder, provides an alternative to existing HD measures that do not include all the beliefs deemed important by more recent research and the sample in the current study. This tool has the potential to encourage open conversations with people experiencing HD about their beliefs and how these may be maintaining problems with hoarding. Further work is needed to support the reliability and validity of this measure in clinical practice, but presents an updated and novel tool to assist in developing a more comprehensive understanding of HD.

Individuals with hoarding disorder exhibit heightened attachment to objects, but little is known about possible drivers of object attachment and associated object saving behaviors. Theory and preliminary evidence posit that the heightened object attachment characteristic of hoarding disorder may be partially explained by the experience of vivid, ‘Proustian’ memories related to objects.

The current study piloted a novel Proustian Memory Task to examine whether self-reported vividness of memories associated with cherished objects, mundane objects, and non-objects was associated with greater urge to save objects and greater hoarding symptoms.

Participants (N=443) included a non-selected community sample recruited from the crowd-sourcing platform Prolific. Participants were asked to identify and describe a memory associated with their most cherished belonging, a mundane belonging, and a recent vacation (i.e. non-object control). Participants also reported their urge to save the identified objects and completed a self-report measure of hoarding symptoms.

Hoarding symptoms were not associated with vividness of memories of cherished objects, or with non-objects, but were associated with greater vividness of memories of mundane objects. Greater vividness of memories associated with objects was associated with a greater urge to save both cherished and mundane objects; however, this relationship was stronger for mundane compared with cherished objects. The relationship between memory vividness and urge to save objects was not impacted by hoarding symptoms.

Findings provide preliminary evidence that the experience of Proustian memories, particularly those related to mundane objects, may play a role in object attachment and hoarding symptoms.

Preliminary evidence suggests that mental imagery may be an important clinical feature in hoarding. Individuals who hoard use objects as receptacles for memories, and experience more frequent, intrusive and distressing images compared with the general community. However, the specific nature of these associations remains poorly understood.

We aimed to investigate whether hoarding traits were related to the ability to voluntarily generate imagery in different sensory modalities, and uniquely with the tendency to experience negative intrusive imagery. We also aimed to understand the mechanism by which mental imagery experiences may confer vulnerability to hoarding problems.

Undergraduates (n=328) completed questionnaires assessing hoarding, beliefs about objects, imagining ability across the senses, and negative intrusive imagery, as well as symptom measures of depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress. We conducted Pearson’s correlations, hierarchical regressions, and mediational analyses.

Hoarding tendencies were associated with reduced visualising ability, but not with the capacity to deliberately generate imagery in other senses. Hoarding was also uniquely associated with the tendency to experience negative involuntary imagery when controlling for symptoms of depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and post-traumatic stress. Object-memory beliefs partially mediated the relationship between hoarding and reduced visualising ability. Object attachment partially mediated the relationship between hoarding and negative intrusive imagery.

Results suggest that visualisation difficulties may promote a reliance on objects to facilitate recall, and experiencing negative intrusive imagery may strengthen object attachment. Findings may inform imagery-based conceptualisations and treatments of hoarding problems, such as imagery training or modification interventions.