What Treatments, Medications and Therapy Are Available for Hoarding?
Treatments for Hoarding
Whether using treatments, medications, and therapy to help the hoarder from hoarding no process has been 100% or even 50% effective. Scientists have discovered the stronger the hoarding illness in a patient the less effective the medicine will be. There are many reasons why treatment of any kind has not been effective, including the fact that hoarding is still a new illness and that patients do not believe they have an issue or problem.
Below is a list and discussion of choices a hoarding victim has to hopefully get control of the devastating illness.
Medications For Hoarding
The popular medication that is being offered to patients with hoarding is Paxil. Paxil is used as the first line of medications to attempt to treat the hoarding illness. Sadly this medicine has not been the magic bullet that most hoped it would be. According to OCD studies ( not an official hoarding study ) that most OCD patients that also had hoarding issues did receive enough benefit from Paxil.
The second option to medicine would be these medicine's- risperidone, olanzapine, quetiapine, haloperidol, and fluphenazine.
The hoarding clean up industry as well as hoarding mental health professional are hoping that an official hoarding research study will be performed. As of yet no study has been performed.
Therapy For Hoarders
What has had some success with the hoarding illness is Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) Another term for CBT is exposure and response therapy.
Basically this is the process of a therapists visiting the home and talking about the objects being hoarded and discuss about removing the objects from the home.
Getting the patient to discover why they hoard particular items and work out their fears and anxieties on removing the items.
This process as you can imagine is extremely difficult to pull off. Most hoarders either will avoid this type of treatment because they will deny they have an issue or they are extremely embarrassed and would wish everyone would just leave them alone.
Again there is no studies to prove or disapprove that CBT therapy works. The issue is that in comparison to OCD patients who eventually request help, hoarding patients either avoid help due to embarrassment or firmly believe that they don't have an issue.
This makes a major challenge to researchers and therapists alike.
There is constantly changing information for Hoarders but this is the most current as of today. Hopefully in the future their will be more information on the topic as it's beginning to become focused upon with the television series and Hoarders who are admitting their Hoarding Illness.