I don't think you read the whole article--both premises were clearly stated and extensively supported. Hoarding has long been considered a disorder, it was just

I don't think you read the whole article--both premises were clearly stated and extensively supported. Hoarding has long been considered a disorder, it was just rolled into OCD. However, enough of the patterns are differentiated from OCD that it can rightly be classified as a distinct disorder: "at least 80 percent of people who engaged in extreme hoarding didn’t meet the criteria for OCD. They were more prone to depression than those with OCD. They had more difficulty making decisions. They were far less likely to be aware of their behavior as a problem. Genetic linkage studies showed a different pattern of heritability than OCD, and brain scans showed a different pattern of activation. Drugs that were successful in treating OCD were not effective for hoarding." As for the on-the-rise component, there are multiple explanations offered, but this part struck me: "In other words, something has changed—in history and culture—to cause hoarding to emerge as a prevalent psychiatric disorder. Objects have taken on, for those who hoard them, individual personalities with outsized emotional significance. They cannot be casually discarded; they are woven into the person’s very sense of self..."