St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton Researchers Look to Unbury the Burden of Hoarding Disorder
Friday, May 30th 2014 – Hamilton, ON – Overwhelmed by what felt like unsurmountable stress and the feeling of being buried beneath embarrassment, 51-year-old Brenda McDonald decided it was time to seek help for hoarding disorder. By sharing her experiences of her successful treatment, Brenda is also helping researchers at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton examine stress reactivity in individuals with hoarding disorder.
“I felt like I could hardly breathe – it was very embarrassing,” recalls Brenda McDonald, who was diagnosed with hoarding disorder in 2012. “This is not the way that I wanted to live or have my family live.”
Hoarding disorder is a newly recognized classification of mental illness that affects between 5 and 8% of our population, and is defined by excessive accumulation of clutter in living spaces, making it nearly impossible to use the space properly.
“Hoarding was previously categorized as a subtype of OCD. However, hoarding disorder is now classified as a separate disorder,” clarifies Dr. Karen Rowa, a psychologist at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton’s Anxiety Treatment and Research Centre and an international hoarding disorder expert previously featured on The Learning Channel’s (TLC) program Hoarding: Buried Alive. “Previous research suggests that individuals diagnosed with hoarding disorder have a sharper reaction to stress, coupled with a lower ability to tolerate stressful situations. If this is the case, this factor could prevent individuals with hoarding disorder from fully benefiting from successful treatment programs.”
The treatment that Brenda received at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton allowed her to begin to resolve the underlying issues that had caused her hoarding to become a problem. Supported by her loving family including five children, she was then able to tackle the physical clutter externally in her home.
Recovery for individuals with hoarding disorder is a process that takes years. Dr. Rowa notes that while hoarding is not curable, it is definitely manageable. Brenda’s continued success will depend largely on the tools that she was provided with during treatment.
“Depending on the findings of our study, we could potentially implement distress tolerance therapy tools as standard treatment,” explains Dr. Rowa. “This could improve the quality of life for more than one million Canadians estimated to be affected by hoarding disorder.”
“Last night, for the first time in years, I was able to clean off my desk until I could see my desk’s surface,” says Brenda. “The hardest thing to do is to get started. When you can see the progress that you made, you start to feel good and you want to keep going.”
More Information
About Hoarding Disorder
Hoarding disorder is defined as the excessive accumulation of clutter in living spaces, which results in people being unable to use their living spaces properly. Most individuals with hoarding disorder have an acquiring problem, and they feel the need to acquire things compulsively and keep them. Hoarding disorder has been defined for the first time as a mental disorder in the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published in 2013.
About the Study
Many individuals diagnosed with hoarding disorder are inhibited by stress they face in having to break their old habits of hoarding to establish new, healthy ones. Researchers at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton are conducting a study that explores stress reactivity in individuals with hoarding disorder, aiming to improve care for individuals diagnosed with hoarding disorder.
The role of researchers like Dr. Karen Rowa is invaluable to the treatment process of newly-diagnosed disorders such as hoarding disorder. Research defines treatment, which then shapes outcomes and the quality of life that patients receive. Our researchers work to reinvent exploration by working with clinicians to bring the best care possible to all patients. By participating in the research process, patients engage in the exploration process to not only improve their own lives, but to improve the quality of life for others like them around the world.
The study is being conducted by graduate student Ayateh Hamedani, which is currently a graduate student enrolled in the McMaster Integrative Neuroscience Discovery & Study (MiNDS) graduate program. Drs. Randi McCabe and Joelle LeMoult serve as Ms. Hamedani’s supervisors and the study’s principal investigators, with Dr. Karen Rowa as a co-investigator.
This study is ongoing and continues to look for participants with hoarding disorder. For more information, please contact the Anxiety Treatment and Research Centre (Email: phstudyatrc@gmail.com or Tel: 905-522-1155, ext. 34267).
About Research at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton
St. Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton is an academic health sciences centre fully affiliated with the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University. Our researchers aim to better understand prevalent medical and mental health issues today's society in order to develop advanced therapies and treatments that will improve the quality of life for patients in our community and around the world. In pursuit of this goal, research in the areas of clinical science, mental health, nephrology, respirology (Firestone Institute for Respiratory Health) and virology attract over $25 million annually in grants and research support funding. For more information about research at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton, please visit www.stjoes.ca/research.
About St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton
St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton is a regional leader in patient-centred care providing acute care, research, teaching, community and international outreach programs throughout our network. Since being founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph in 1890, our hospitals span three specialized campuses in the Greater Hamilton Area (Charlton Campus, West 5th Campus and King Street Campus), with St. Joseph’s Villa Dundas providing long-term care and St. Joseph’s Home Care providing personalized home care traversing the reach of our region. For more information about St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton, please visit www.stjoes.ca.