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There's a thin line between being a packrat and being a hoarder. The level of cleanliness and organization is why many packrats "get away with" collecting things and rarely throwing things away. Hoarders (in the "squalor" sense) don't "get away with" it because the packrat behavior has gone so far that you no longer have the ability to be clean and organized. I don't doubt that many packrats share the same obsessive and dependent traits that hoarders tend to.
Edith and Edie Beale lived in squalor because they were impoverished hoarders, which received national attention because of the Onasis name and the fact that they lived in a hugemongous mansion. As Drolefile alluded to, it's really difficult to be an A&E type of hoarder when you live in a 28 room mansion.
But, Langley Collyer's case (the first one on the link) mirrors what happened in the CNN story for this thread.
Last edited by DrPhil; 07-20-2010 at 07:26 PM.
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