When does a large collection become hoarding?

True! I have Barbies and SO many other kinds of dolls . . . a lot more than 70!

And I've definitely been called a hoarder, mainly by my dad. It bothers me a lot, simply because he says it in such a nasty way and--in my opinion--he's incorrect. If you love the things you collect and want to show them off, enjoy looking at them every day, take pictures of them, etc., I don't think you're a hoarder. I don't have dolls just because I panic at the thought of getting rid of any. And, as others have said, they don't interfere with my life. It just bothers me that people are so quick to judge--try to understand first, get all the facts, and then if you think someone is really suffering from a disorder, try to compassionately get them the help they need. Don't just blindly throw about accusations because a person does things differently than you do.

 

I don't know what the technical definition of hoarding is.

However, my opinion is that hoarding is when you hold onto things that either have little or no real value because you cannot "let go" and/or continually buy items not because you really need/want them but because the act of purchasing the item gives you a "buzz" in and of itself.

When both of these things are present in one person it is easy to see why hoarding can become a serious and life-destroying problem. Simply clearing out the clutter is not the way to help such people, these people need a lot of support to learn to let go and to move on to healthier more productive ways of feeling good than making unnecessary purchases.

I would also like to add something that is very important to keep in mind when considering psychological matters, psychiatric conditions, emotional problems and unhealthy behaviours and that is the following (which I learned while attaining my psychology major):

It is only useful or necessary to diagnose any mental condition if it interferes negatively with the person's life or the lives of those around them.

Imagine the following scenario of a person suffering both causes of hoarding but who has an unlimited supply of money, a huge storage facility for his/her purchases and does not spent a problematic amount of time dealing with their purchases/storage and does not feel internally conflicted about their "unusual hobby" such a person might even turn their storage facility into a "museum of ....(contemporary culture/unusual items/ even BJDs)" and be considered a fully functioning if somewhat eccentric member of society.

I don't feel that collecting is hoarding in and of itself. I don't think that having so many dolls that you forget you had some is hoarding (I have saved plenty of littlest pets in a box in a wardrobe for when my children are older, I have no idea which ones I have but I don't consider it hoarding mostly because it is not causing any problems).

If any part of the BJD hobby is causing interference in a person's life, there is a problem that should be seen to.

I would say that it is a "hoarding" problem when part of the issue stems from a need to make purchases even for things that are not really wanted and are soon stored away and forgotten (causing guilt/anxiety/money problems/relationship problems/(extreme) storage problems/etc) and/or an inability to part with items that are either of no financial value and should be thrown away and/or are of no significant use and should be sold/given away (causing problems eg those listed above).

It should be highly noted that the factor here is causing problems. Lots of people have emotional problems and may also own BJDs, that does not mean they should not have the dolls. Even in the case of a true hoarder of BJDs the advice would almost never be to throw away all the dolls. Instead it would be to learn not to need to make so many purchases and to learn how to throw away/sell the items that are not positively contributing to your happiness.

 

There's a woman in my town that collects antique dolls and she had over seven hundred several years ago. I don't even know how many she counts today; I bet her collection has at least doubled in size. And no, she's not a hoarder, she's simply a collector.

Like so many people have said, hoarding is a 'disease' with very specific symptoms. As long as the collection doesn't interfere with someone's life and they're not ashamed of the amount of dolls they've gathered, I can't see a person as a hoarder.

 

to me, hoarding is when collecting gets to the point of neglecting yourself or others. if you're not harming yourself or anyone else, i really don't see a problem.
but i also agree with OP; if you can't remember what dolls you have, there's a problem

 

But that problem may simply be a poor memory.

 

to me, it is when you just lose interest and just leave them to accumulate there...

 

I myself have technically left several hobbies, but I still have the collections generated from them. Never mind that these "collections" are kept organized and neat in boxes, and I am in no way negatively affected by them. Would you still call me a hoarder?

However, while I wouldn't go so far as to call it hoarding...juuuust yet, your third point would be cause for concern. If I had a friend who did that, I'd start being concerned long before they started having dolls take over their house. It would certainly be odd to continue a collection you're no interested in... perhaps doing so would be indicative of compulsive behavior, something that seems to be a consistent, glaring factor in hoarding.

Okay, so is the person buying them still...or did they just lose interest in playing and packed them back in their boxes, leaving them in a closet? Accumulate would suggest they are buying more still, in which case my point to youngbjd comes back into play.

If they are just leaving them in their boxes, never collecting anymore, not buying anything else for them, or just never doing anything else with them, but not keeping them displayed, they could just be keeping them to pass down to family. I mean...in a literal sense, this person would be hoarding these dolls, but it would not exactly be treated as a major issue unless keeping the dolls had negative effects on the person... or if a family member was really concerned over the fact that someone was keeping a collection they no longer seemed interested in.

 

In my opinion hoarding (in relation to dolls) is when you have so many dolls they are taking over the home and then simply becoming clutter. If you have so many dolls that there is no where sensible to display them and you have them packed in boxes and are barely bothering with them for months on end, then that is a problem. There's no sense having them if you don't intend to display them in a suitable display area/cabinet. If they are starting to encroach in areas of the home where they really aren't suited then again that's a problem. I knew an elderly lady who used to hoard boxes tons of them, many with uneaten food items in them which of course attracts unwanted pests. These boxes/cartons were up the stairs, hallway, basically everywhere to the point that it was a health and safety issue. Also if you are addicted to buying dolls even when you can't actually afford them and then don't really bother with them once you get them (you're already thinking about "your next fix" e.g which doll to buy next) then that is definately verging on the side of hoarding. It's okay to keep a few dolls in their boxes but if its 100+ then that is pretty ridiculous. I have many vintage dolls/toys in their original boxes but unlike most BJD boxes they are window boxes and you can still see the item inside making them suitable for display. I have some items stored safely away as i've currently run out of display space but I do intend to display all of them later on. All of my dolls are contained in one room, they don't intrude into other rooms of the house. I wouldn't let it get that far, I would have to downsize. It all comes down to self-disipline. Remember this is just my view.

 

I would suppose it is only hoarding if the dolls take over your house and bank account. If they are stuffed into all corners of the house so that you can barely move, i would say most of us are a long way from that Owning a healthy collection of anything is fine in my book, even if one whole room of a house is dedicated to it, i wouldn't call it hoarding. Hoarding tends to be when a house is so full there is a danger to the family there, possibly it is a word that gets thrown round too much by people to describe situations that are not actually a hoard.

 

I'm pretty close to hoarding. Thank goodness I don't have an irrational attachment to magazines and newspapers and other stuff like that. I come close enough with the dolls and art supplies... but art is my hobby and my job, so there is a method to my hoarding problem! And the price of the dolls does keep the entire house from getting filled up too quickly...! The thing is, I've been doing this for so long, even at the prices, it's beginning to look like a doll store/workshop around here even so! They have spread out of the one room... but I kind of want to see them around me and not just keep them in the one room... And I'm also working on painting and assembling some... so they are laying around...

Anyway, it's close to hoarding. It doesn't help that I am terrible at organization. There IS room here to have them all sorted out on shelves... I just haven't bothered to get that done.

 

I like to watch the TV show hoarders when I'm in need of motivation to get organised. I think a collection becomes hoarding when you buy new things, or still keep items that hold no value to you. There are some people on here who definitely seem like hoarders, but I guess as long as it isn't affecting their health or relationships it doesn't really matter what people collect.

 

I can be classified as a hoarder, this is due to a mental illness and I also collect things. What I have found is that my collections do not grow as big as my hoard does, because I like many other people, hoard other things outside of their collections.

I collect hot toys, reborn dolls, dragon statues and now have just recently put my first BJD on layaway, and I also have a few other dolls around the place. Not once has ANY of these collections become part of my hoard or gotten to the point OF hoarding.

What has gotten to the point of hoarding in my case is Coke a cola and soft drink bottles, drink containers, newspapers, empty boxes and small knick knacks I buy at the op shop because it's cute and I want it.

Hoarding and collecting can sometimes go hand in hand, but from my personal opinion it is two entirely separate things. I hoard without thinking of it, literally if you look under my bed I've hoarded a bunch of bottles under there that will take me at least two weeks and help from my mum to get rid of them. But with my collection I think it through, I research and make sure I have the money, I pick out the specific ones I want and never impulse buy. I did that once and ended up with a hot toy I no longer like.

So basically TL;DR, hoarding and collecting seem to be in different parts of the brain, and whist they can sometimes overlap it doesn't seem to be that way in my own personal case.

And if anyone is wondering no I'm not ashamed of being a hoarder, and I don't keep it a secret my friends and family know and they each help me in their own way and I work through it and battle it every day. Just today I didn't buy a cute little knick knack I saw because I knew I needed to buy something else which was the first time I've ever done that.

 

The thing is hoarding DOES affect health and relationships. The amount of times that I have stopped people coming to my house because of my hoard is insane. But I choose to keep my hoard instead of seeing my friends until they show up at my door step and I end up having to go get help again.
If a collector just collects many things but can still function in a 'normal' way, inviting people over, not becoming extremely depressed because of their hoard then it is not hoarding it is just collecting.

As for keeping things that hold no value to you, I do not think that is true, I think when it comes to collecting everything holds value to you, no matter how insignificant it seems to someone else. I have some build a bear clothes that I no longer have on a bear, but no one is allowed to chuck them out. Not because I'm a hoarder, but those clothes remind me of a trip to Adelaide when I first saw pandas in real life. And that makes them worth keeping.

 

In spite of having a pretty ridiculous number of dolls by any rational standard, somehow I've never been accused of being a hoarder... I'm just too much of a "neat-freak" for that, I guess. If this crew or their stuff ever got to the point of taking over a room (Much less the whole house-), I'd end up going on a cleaning and culling spree the likes of which the dolly gods had never seen! The dust and clutter would absolutely drive me up a proverbial wall.

Even though there are well over a hundred of them now, my dolls are displayed in a way that takes up surprisingly little space. They're all confined to a set of matching display cabinets. Their kit is all sorted and stowed away in two small chests of drawers in my library/sewing room and part of one upstairs closet. In all honesty, our books take up considerably more space than the dolls do.... Though the library, too, is organized and culled on a pretty regular basis. I don't let the books over-run their allotted space any more than the dolls.

So, yes. It's entirely possible to have an extensive collection and to own a lot of things without being a hoarder. As long as you keep it all in perspective and can go through and prune the accumulated mass of what you have regularly, you're in no danger. You own your things. It's when you *can't* do that and the possessions start to own you, so to speak, that you get into trouble.

 

To be a hoarder I feel like your collection has to be ruling you and causing you distress. For me, BJDs actually limit the amount of silly trinkets and action figures I would have bought had I not gotten into them. I have hundreds of action figures chilling in boxes up in the attic that I used to buy and then do nothing with aside from occasionally displaying and letting them collect dust. I don't always remember if my wife and I have 22 or 23 BJDs in the cabinet (becuase sometimes I sell one and reshell another and lose track), but I won't get more than will fit in said cabinet and the fact that I paint and sew and photograph with them and actually interact with them instead of just keeping them sitting there makes me much less likely to buy every figure that catches my eye, because it doesn't give me the same emotional payoff in the end as starting a new project.