"The innovation of the past decade was the proposal that hoarding was a disorder in itself. With that claim, plus the prevalence estimates, which, however conjectural, were confidently asserted, experts on the subject—there was now a subject, and experts—felt safe in saying that hoarding presented “a major threat to public health.”...
Herring says that he is not interested so much in hoarding as in “discourses of material deviance”; that is, the web of thought and feeling that, as a society, we have constructed around hoarding. The operative word here is “deviance.” Herring repeatedly cites Michel Foucault (he might have nodded at Thomas Szasz as well), to the effect that people in authority use psychiatry as a means of social control."
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/let-go
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