Sometimes ( often ? almost always ? ), the best thing we can take away from a book by "experts" on "hoarding" is not what they tell, but *how* they tell it.
I'm dubbing this narrative style "Morbid Fascinated Sensationalized Disgust and Contempt" ( MFSDC for short ).
This can be seen in places like
* Contents of Collyer brothers' house, being enumerated as they are thrown out the window - apparently to shock us with their randomness and pointlessness - but, as I point out, these are actually quite sensible and most have definite value and are perfectly appropriate for the brothers
* Irene's Bottle Caps - as Frost describes her fascination with them, and her being upset at his reaction ( which also tells us more about the preceding interaction than he would like, it would seem )
* generally, most depictions of cluttered environments depicted as case examples
If we read between the lines, it would appear that the intent is to impress the reader with "wow, look at the freaky, unreasonable stuff or behaviors".
But, this also tells us just how objective and impartial authors are.. not.
And, simultaneously, what we do NOT see depicted is a balanced overview of the situation - nature of possessions, quantity, timeline, flows, the systemic troubleshooting questions ( "what is the main problem here? what are the active flows? what are the main points of dysfunction?" ) - they don't examine any of that.
It's an example of a Magic Trick - authors drawing attention to the "impressive" elements, while avoiding a balanced examination of the situation and the significance of the things portrayed in it.
I kinda understand it - without this, these books would become significantly less "fascinating" and "interesting" - more objective, scientific and impartial, just like they would like us to believe - but significantly shorter, dryer and more boring.
It seems to me these books are more a work of journalism - bad journalism, due to high bias and low objectivity and faulty science - or perhaps good self-journalism on bad science..