The New Yorker: “Let It Go”

Dean and Professor Gail Steketee, PhD, was named in Joan Acocella’s article “Let it Go – Are we Becoming a Nation of Hoarders,” published in The New Yorker. Here, Acocella tells the stories of her mother, Homer and Langley Collyer, and Edith Ewing Bouvier Baele and her daughter Edith, also known as Big and Little Edie, all mild to severe hoarders.

The sense that hoarding was a symptom of genteel eccentricity started to change about twenty years ago. In 1993, Randy Frost, a professor of psychology at Smith College, and one of his students, Rachel Gross, published an article, in Behaviour Research and Therapy, to the effect that hoarding was not rare but common, and a dangerous business. By 2010, Frost and a colleague, Gail Steketee, in their book “Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things”—which examined the Collyers in detail—were claiming that between six and fifteen million Americans were engaged in pathological hoarding.

Click here to read Acocella’s full article. Learn more about Steketee’s research and publications, including “Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things,” here.