I had a chance to test, on myself, the very "overwhelm" and "confusion" touted so much by the "experts" on "hoarding".
I moved my stuff, and just after the final unloading, there it was -
Chaos!
Can't find anything!
Can't move around, too stuffed!
Don't know where to start..
And I.. understood it, I saw what it's made of and how it can be defeated.
It's a paper dragon - granted, a pretty big and ugly paper dragon, but a perfectly defeatable one - with math and basic actions.
"Experts" make much of this "overwhelm", "confusion", "difficulty making decisions", "difficulty to stay focused", etc., and they make it sound like it's characteristic of "hoarders", of this purported "mental illness".
I saw it clearly for what it is.
Just A Really Big Project.
Probably made more difficult by shortage of resources, time, knowledge, and every kind of interference and discouragement coming from family members and "experts", telling to instead start discarding right and left.
Anyone would be overwhelmed, given the objectives and the scope - the fact that not everyone would have the same objectives notwithstanding.
And it's all the more difficult, not to say impossible, to make meaningful future-oriented decisions about disposal.
It is certainly not a sign of mental illness - otherwise, anyone who ever failed at a project would be diagnosed.
Nor is the desire to keep things necessarily a sign of mental illness.
Knowledge, time, boxes, yellow sticky notes and a marker - that's probably sufficient for most people to be able to succeed.
This isn't to dismiss anyone's difficulty - this is only to dismiss the misleading portrayal of this by the "experts" on "hoarding".
Write out a todo list and start doing it.
With enough boxes, space and time, I can sort just about anything.