Mental Imagery in
Hoarding Disorder
PROJECT OVERVIEW
BACKGROUND
As humans, we have this incredible capacity to ‘see with the mind’s eye’. We can conjure up wild and fantastical scenes while we’re dreaming, replay pleasant experiences from the past in our memory, and time-travel forwards in our minds to simulate future events before they have even happened…
Psychologists call this ability ‘Mental imagery’. Because our brains can respond in the same way to imagined events as real events (even when we know they’re just imaginary!), a lot of the time mental imagery can be harnessed as a powerful tool to enrich our lives. There’s good reason why sports coaches often will often get athletes to imagine ahead of time exactly how they’re going to play to help them improve their performance!
However, for people living with mental health conditions, their mental images can often get in the way of life and keep them from getting well. For people living with Hoarding Disorder, the memories they associate with their items can keep them ‘stuck’ in the past, unable move on and discard things they no longer need. They may also get unwelcome mental images or envision scary and unpleasant future scenes (for example, about waste or disappointing others), that ‘pop’ into their minds when they consider discarding items, which can be frightening and discouraging.
THIS PROJECT
Isaac Sabel, PhD Student
My research explores how we can help people with hoarding disorder deal with these images, and whether we can use the power of mental imagery to help them find the courage and motivation to discard items they are attached to, but no longer need in their lives.
To help deal with troublesome mental images, Psychologists have developed a technique known as ‘imagery rescripting’ where they will work with people to change the content of their problematic image into something more useful and desirable
While imagery res-scripting has seen some fantastic outcomes with other conditions, like Social Anxiety and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, it has yet to be tested and researched on individuals with hoarding problems.
My hope is that by doing exactly that we can make these mental images less troublesome for individuals living with Hoarding Disorder and help them overcome any motivational difficulties they might be having around discarding.
LOOKING AHEAD
If this all works, it would be useful to incorporate some mental imagery work into our pre-existing treatment packages for hoarding disorder so we can try to improve patient outcomes.