As many as 19 million Americans have a hoarding disorder. For some people it presents as a tendency toward extreme clutter, but for others the compulsive accumulation of and inability to discard objects is a debilitating and even life-threatening condition.

For decades, hoarding was rarely studied and little understood. When it was discussed at all, it went by the name Collyer’s syndrome, after two brothers who died in 1947 in a Harlem house filled with over a hundred tons of junk — one of starvation, the other crushed by falling objects. 

News reports of the brothers’ deaths called them “eccentrics,” and despite being clearly mentally ill, perhaps they were in a way, as there were few like them in those days. But it’s a different story now. Hoarding is on the rise in the United States. There are many reasons, but underlying them all is capitalism, which creates simultaneous conditions of scarcity and surplus — a fundamental condition of dispossession, and endless possessions to fill the void.