My final Article by Lucy Cooper.

Obsession to me is a hoarder. A person who has needs to collect something and let it take over their lives. My Nan was one of these people.

She was a strong minded, independent individual who had the need to add more to her collection of books and Jigsaws every week. But with frequent visits to her house, I began to notice books piled up on each other with magazines by their side, never touched.

Compulsive hoarding is an excessive amount of objects that may have no meaning to that person. It could range from toilet rolls to cardboard boxes which the sufferer cannot throw away. This can be called disposophobia which is being linked to the animal behavior of food hoarding. Animals such as hamsters and rats do this in order to survive – is that why so many sufferers become obsessed with this compulsive need? Ephemera is the collecting of postcards, stamps and tickets which were created to only last a short time. We collect these objects because they mean something to us and they can also count as a hobby. It does not become obsessive because it’s controlled, such as stamp collecting. Stamps are placed in protective covering and left in stored albums- when they are full, the person buys another album. It only becomes obsessive by the need to buy more albums for their stamps until they have filled two whole bookshelves. By deciding how much that person has collected in numbers, we immediately call it obsessive. A suffer who collects books and magazines only think of the need to have more - this is called Bibliomania. Some suffers can buy the same book in the same edition and be completely unaware they have it already and may have more hidden away. A magazine edition which only runs for a short period of time can evoke the need to keep buying the next copy. Once it has finished, does it leave a lasting impression of this ‘need’ to have more? This also happens with the series of books that you may never read but you need them all.

My Nan was always collecting series of books and magazines that she could never read properly due to cataracts in her eye. Still she brought five or six a week and they would sit in a pile on the floor in one of the rooms. Her friends were never allowed to visit her either, I asked her about this once but she never said anything. I now wonder if she did all this to fill up her house, to make it as big and less lonely as it must have felt. With all the dolls, bears, jigsaws and books she had, I think they provided comfort to her. Is this the same comfort other suffers search for, the need to fill an empty hole called loneliness?