Actually, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder [which is what hoarders are suffering from] is a highly treatable mental illness, IF [and yes, its a BIG if] the sufferer commits to treatment, and follows through with their treatment team's recommendations.

Medication and therapy, when used in conjunction with each other, are highly successful in treating most anxiety disorders, OCD included.

Unfortunately, many OCD sufferers lack insight into their illness, and thus refuse treatment, or do not actively participate in treatment, merely going through the motions until they are discharged.

The current recidivism rates for hoarders are so high because court ordered mental evaluation and treatment are not required as part of the sentencing. 

In fact, the act of seizing all of the animals, charging and convicting the offender all without ever requiring mental health treatment INCREASES the chance of repeating the behavior, because you've reinforced many of the ruminations and delusions associated with the disorder and validated the offender's belief that what they are doing is correct.

Encourage your lawmakers to change your animal cruelty laws to include mandatory mental health treatment for hoarders. 

Animal hoarding has important differences with OCD-related hoarding, as it does not seem to share the same array of repetitive compulsive behaviors such as washing or checking compulsions, or the same issues with order. Hoarders also have much greater impairment of insight, potentially reaching delusional levels of impairment, compared to OCD patients. By comparison, there is considerable overlap of hoarding with impulse control disorders. There is a growing consensus that hoarding has more differences than similarities with OCD, and psychologists are currently considering whether hoarding should be a separate disorder in DSM-V (DSM is the manual of psychological disorders recognized by the medical community). A recent (June 2010) in-depth review by eminent psychologists explains the differences between OCD and hoarding, and suggests there is sufficient evidence for creation of a new disorder, provisionally called hoarding disorder, in DSM-V.

www.tufts.edu/vet/hoarding/abthoard.htm 

There are SIX types of OCD.  The people who wrote that article are fundamentally misinformed about what OCD is, and the variety of ways it manifests.

Not all of them involve what people typically think of as OCD behavior.  That's a misconception held by people outside the mental health field.

Many people with OCD have ZERO compusions whatsoever, and suffer strictly from obsessive ruminations, which you would never know about unless they told you.  They display no outward signs of disordered behavior.
I have OCD.  You'd never know it if I didn't tell you, because its OCD- Pure Obsessional Type.  I don't compulsively do anything, let alone compulsively wash/clean.  My girlfriend would love it if I did spontaneously develop that flavor of OCD, though.

The Six Types of OCD:

1. Checkers worry that incorrectly performed actions will cause a bad thing to happen.
2. Washers and Cleaners worry that germs and contamination will cause bad things to happen.
3. Orderers worry that having things out of order will cause bad things to happen.
4. Pure Obsessionals just can't stop thinking about bad things happening.
5. Hoarders worry that bad things might happen if they throw something away.
6. Scrupulous OCDers worry that they are a bad thing happening or about to happen.

[Thank god, there are 6.  Its a nice even number.  ]

While there is a push to create a seperate diagnosis of "Hoarding Disorder", it hasn't been taken very seriously by the current DSM workgroup.  What is more likely is to see animal hoarders more often diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive PERSONALITY Disorder following the DSM-V publication.

Personality Disorders are an entirely different can of worms, and nothing but extremely intense Dialectical Behavioral Therapy has ever been shown to have any efficacy in treating any PD.  Medication is virtually worthless in treating PDs, and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy is only as effective as the person makes it, because it focuses on providing the patient with a set of skills.  If they don't use those skills, then its all for naught.

There is also a push to create an OCD Spectrum [the current working group seems to love the spectrum concept.  To an almost laughable degree], under which the different sub-types of OCD, other obsessional-type disorders, and under which would fall the newly added [if they are added] diagnoses of Hoarding and Skin Picking disorders.

There is absolutely no proposal to move OCD to the Impulse Control NOS heading in the DSM.  In fact, there is quite the opposite push- to move some of the disorders currently classed under Impulse Control TO the OCD/Anxiety headings.  Trichotillomania, for example.

Despite the lukewarm debate in the psychiatric community, animal hoarders do meet the criteria of OCD.
Virtually every interviewed hoarder stated they feared for the animal's wellbeing if they got rid of them.
They feared that the next owners would not take as good care of them, that Animal Control would destroy them, that they'd somehow be worse off than in the hoarder's care.

I do think, however, that shifting to a diagnosis of Obessesive Compulsive PERSONALITY Disorder may in fact be more appropriate, since hoarders seem to show little response to psychopharmacalogical intervention alone, indicating that they suffer from a PD versus an Axis 1 disorder.

Very interesting! I now know why nurses are all crazy! I think probably most of us have #1 &/or #3! Beause if things aren't in proper order & checked multiple times, something bad WILL happen! Think of the 5 rights of med administration, or your typical pre-op list of things to check....our profession creates the Professional OCD! LOL!  Sorry, not trying to hijack the thread, & yes, hoarding is very bad. jackie harris

Great thread beetree, and I agree with a lot of what you say mudwick, especially re PD. I prefer the term personality-related difficulties to PD, mainly because I like to think about the person and not the diagnosis. Although diagnoses have their place, they often do not help to understand or formulate plans which might lead to successful treatment or understanding, they can be just a list of symptoms. For some people, their OCD symptoms are not so integral to their personality development, e.g. in a response to stress in adult life - these often are very amenable to straightforward treatment with psychological therapy and/or medication. But for some, the OCD element is integral to the formation of the personality, and hence to try to treat - e.g. enforcing treatment in some way, is to attack the integrity of the person and may be doomed to fail unless thoughtfully approached. In some cases there be sufficient evidence to suggest that it is not wise to even try (and hence in the case of someone like this collecting dogs, the optimal approach 'may' be to prevent them from this). I think it's more important to find ways to understand the person, their history, and the meaning of various things for them in order to engage with them. There is some evidence that particular types of early attachment experiences leave one predisposed to hoarding type behaviours. We cannot survive unless we attach (whatever the attachment figure is like we will do our best to attach to them as a child). If we take a hypothetical example of person whose early life is dominated by an unpredictable caregiver who is unwell - one month they're fine the next they are not. When good they provide good care but when unwell they are emotionally unavailable, thus potentially setting up an anxious/ambivalent style of attachment in the young child. One way for the child to cope with this is to seek constancy in objects as the option of getting cross with the attachment figure (for example trying to tell the parent what they need, is not possible as they are too young and insecure to be able to do so) is too risky as they need the attachment figure. This may develop into a central part of the personality (thus internalised) whereby the attainment and keeping of objects (material possessions, wealth, dogs etc) is unconsciously essential to survival, even if rationally these objects do not really satisfy, cause stress/distress or in the case of dogs, cause suffering for the animals. These are just my thoughts. I hope they make some sense as presented.

Mudwick, why do you say professors and Tufts University would be fundamentally uninformed? I've always believed it to be a well respected institution.

The Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium is a collaborative effort to study the hoarding of animals. Members of the consortium include: Arnie Arluke, Ph.D., Northeastern University; Carter Luke, Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; Edward Messner, M.D., Massachusetts General Hospital; Gary Patronek, V.M.D., Ph.D., Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine; and Gail Steketee, Ph.D., Boston University.

More facts:

www.ocfoundation.org/hoarding/types.aspx

Beetree, I know what you're saying and I can't answer for mudwick, but in my opinion no amount of scientific endeavour re human behaviour will ever be truly fact. I doubt they are uninformed, but we do need to be careful in assuming that the outcomes of their excellent and useful research is fact per se. It is still an interpretation of evidence and not without conceptual bias and/or other bias.

Beetree,

To begin with, they're claiming something fundamentally false about the DSM-V proposals.
That makes anything else they assert, suspect.

There are a lot of divisions in psychiatry.  A lot.
For example, there are clinical psychiatrists who diagnose PTSD in people who have experienced nothing more "traumatic" than being bullied at work.  Despite the fact that NOTHING about their experiences meet the clinical definition of trauma, or the clinical critieria for PTSD, many psychiatrists have their own agenda, plain and simple.

The Anxiety and OCD Workgroup for DSM-V has *not* recommended moving OCD to the Impulse Control Disorders cluster, and has NOT proposed a diagnosis of a Hoarding Disorder to be grouped under the Impulse Control Cluster.  They have, however, proposed that it be considered a sub-type of OCD, and/or that it appear along a spectrum of Obsessive Compulsive DisorderS.  To quote the Workgroup directly:

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

The work group is recommending that this disorder be included under a grouping of Anxiety and Obsessive-Compulsive Spectrum Disorders

Obsessive-Compulsive Spectrum Sub-Work Group

This sub-work group continues to work on literature reviews that address key issues for each of the diagnoses we are addressing. These include reviews of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), hoarding, body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), Tourette’s disorder and tic disorders, trichotillomania and compulsive skin-picking, and stereotypic movement disorder. The subworkgroup is also reviewing larger issues about the optimal classification of these disorders; in particular, the relationship between OCD and anxiety disorders, and between the various conditions which have been conceptualized in the literature as obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders.
 

Any mental health professional who would claim that the workgroup has proposed otherwise, is either woefully uninformed, or intentionally misleading.  Either way, I would not consider them an authority.
Their bias is rather obvious when you note that they offer "special" training to mental health professionals to teach them how to treat hoarding disorders.  Its a bit reminiscent of Marsha Linehan's monopoly on Dialectical Behavioral Therapy.

Its important to note that no one associated with "The International OCD Foundation"  [odd name for a group making the argument that hoarding is NOT OCD] was included in the OCD workgroup.
In fact, they're aren't included in *any* DSM workgroup.

There's a reason for that.  Only the experts in each field a chosen.
The foremost experts in the field, thus far, disagree with nearly every conclusion drawn by this foundation.
_____

muldoon, the foremost difference between say, Obessive Compulsive Disorder and Obessive Compulsive PERSONALITY Disorder, is that one is biological, and one is a learned set of behaviors and maladaptive coping mechanisms.

This is true of all personality disorders- they aren't biological, they're the result of a failure to develop adequate coping mechanisms for stress, rejection, abandonment, confrontation, etc.
[There is *some* dispute over this theory in the case of Borderline Personality Disorder, but thus far the APA hasn't really taken it seriously as it isn't really supported by the literature.]

Often, this is due to childhood trauma or neglect. 

This is why PDs are classed on a different axis than all other mental disorders.
OCD is Axis 1.  OCPD is Axis 2.

In theory, no Axis 1 disorder is curable, and EVERY Axis 2 disorder IS.
In practice, virtually n