Ideas of Treatment for Compulsive Hoarders

Compulsive hoarding can make life difficult for the person who has it. It is equally painful for their loved ones to see this problem in the person who matters to them. How does one treat compulsive hoarding? What are the possible hoarding treatment for hoarders?

Experts use two approaches when dealing with compulsive hoarding.

The first is through medication.

Medical treatment aims to correct whatever has gone wrong within the physical make-up of the person with compulsive hoarding problems. The assumption when you use drugs to treat a problem is that something has gone wrong inside his body, making the person behave the way he does. For compulsive hoarders, the usual drugs that have been prescribed for them are the ones used to treat depression.
What are these drugs? Some examples are citalopram,fluoxetine, paroxetine and sertraline.

Sadly, only some people with compulsive hoarding problems have responded positively to the drugs. Many who have been treated with it have not.

The other approach used to treat this disorder is cognitive behavioral therapy.

Don't be intimidated by the term. Let's break it down in order to understand it. It's called cognitive because it treats the way the person with compulsive hoarding thinks and perceives his surroundings. And it's called behavioral because it deals with the problem behaviors of the person by showing another way of acting on what he thinks about his possessions.

Here's how it works. The therapist goes to the compulsive hoarder's home. Over several visits, the therapist makes the person with the disorder aware of the way he thinks about his possessions. Then he slowly shows the person what and how to perceive his possessions in a way that the rest of the world does. He also teaches the compulsive hoarder the techniques and strategies to cope with the fears that drive the abnormal behaviors of the person. After preparing him in this way, he allows the person to use these new skills to organize his home and discard the clutter. When the compulsive hoarder has successfully gained control over his behavior, the therapist then teaches him ways to prevent the compulsions from taking over his life again.

What's the future like for the treatment of compulsive hoarding disorder?

Researchers are now studying the brain patterns of compulsive hoarders and those who are not. An interesting thing they found was that those who were hoarders had lesser brain activity in the area of the brain involved with processing what the person sees. So future treatment would look at how that can be improved to help the person with this disorder.