Reviewer: Gary B Kaniuk, PsyD (Cermak Health Services)
Description: This comprehensive book on hoarding explores phenomenology, etiology, assessment, and intervention.
Purpose: The purpose is to detail "the empirical research on hoarding up to the present time."
Audience: It is aimed at "practitioners and researchers, including psychiatrists, psychologists, neurologists, epidemiologists, social workers, occupational therapists, and other health and mental health professionals who encounter clients with hoarding problems in their practice and research." Randy O. Frost received the Lifetime Achievement Award for work in the field of hoarding by the Mental Health Association of San Francisco. Gail Steketree, Dean of the Boston University School of Social Work, has published extensively on obsessive-compulsive disorders, especially hoarding. Contributors represent an international authorship from the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, and Australia.
Features: After an introduction to the topic, the book details the history of hoarding, dating back 5,000 years. Part Two explores the phenomenology, epidemiology, and diagnosis of hoarding, which impacts approximately 4 percent to 5 percent of adults. Hoarding disorder (HD) is a new disorder in the DSM-5, classified under the Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders section. Comorbid disorders include depressive and anxiety disorders. The next part addresses etiology, noting that it is common among first-degree relatives and that there are neurobiological factors involving the frontal and temporal regions of the brain. Part Four discusses assessment and intervention. It details the various ways to assess hoarding including self-report measures and interview-based assessments. It explores treatments for hoarding, including cognitive-behavioral therapy, bibliotherapy, peer-facilitated support groups, web-based self-help, family therapy, along with pharmacotherapy, and community interventions from public and private agencies. Finally, the book considers hoarding in children and older adults. The authors also provide suggestions for future research. The book is easy to read, with uniformly organized chapters, and contains numerous tables, which help clarify the content. The appendixes contain assessment tools including The Structured Interview for Hoarding Disorder (SIHD; v. 2.0), Hoarding Rating Scale (HRS), Saving Inventory-Revised, UCLA Hoarding Severity Scale, Activities of Daily Living in Hoarding (ADL-H), Saving Cognitions Inventory, Compulsive Acquisition Scale, and Home Environment Index.
Assessment: This is a good comprehensive, practical book on hoarding, written by an international collection of authors.
"As hoarding has become recognized as a disorder, there is a need for books exclusively focused on this problem. None had existed until now. Moreover, there is a growing body of research on hoarding that needed to be synthesized for the purpose of making advances in clinical and research work. This is an important resource. The topics are diverse and cover the broad range of areas associated with hoarding. As there are no other scholarly books on hoarding like this one, the material is original. The editors are the world experts on hoarding, and this handbook is terrific." -Jonathan S. Abramowitz, Ph.D., Professor and Associate Chair of Psychology, University of North Carolina, and President, Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies
"With the publication of DSM-5, there are many professionals newly introduced to Hoarding Disorder. Although the concept and its symptoms are not new, clinicians and researchers now need to understand this condition in a more specific and systematic way. It is a relatively common problem (perhaps as reflected by the number of popular television programs that depict people who hoard) that only has been targeted in the scholarly literature for the past 20 years or so. During that time, there has been a substantial increase in attention paid to this condition and the resultant empirical literature is growing rapidly. It's efficient to contain all of this information within a single title, and this handbook likely will become the resource on the subject of hoarding and acquisition." -Kevin D. Wu, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychology, Northern Illinois University"The book is easy to read, with uniformly organized chapters, and contains numerous tables, which help clarify the content. This is a good comprehensive, practical book on hoarding, written by an international collection of authors." —Gary B Kaniuk, Doody's Health Sciences Book Review
