A man who takes thousands of digital pictures weekly and spends hours every day organising the photos on his computer could have a condition that, until now, has never been described in medical literature. The patient might have “digital hoarding disorder,” according to the authors of a recent report on the man's case.
The 47-year-old man lives in the Netherlands, and doesn't only collect digital photos; he collects physical objects, too. He has been diagnosed with tactile hoarding disorder, which means he holds on to objects ranging from old bicycle parts to scraps of useless paper. The clutter fills his Amsterdam apartment and prevents him from inviting anyone over to visit, according to the report, which was published on October. 8 in the journal BMJ Case Reports.
But much of the man's hoarding occurs in the digital realm — he stores tens of thousands of photographs on his computer, and the four hard drives he has purchased.
His doctors think his tendency to hold onto so many digital files is a problem, according to the report. Dealing with all of these electronic files keeps the man from doing other things, like cleaning his home, going outside or sleeping, they wrote.
“He enjoyed taking photos. However, the processing and saving of the digital pictures caused suffering and distress,”Dr. Martine van Bennekom, a psychiatry resident at the Academic Medical Centre in the Netherlands who treated the man and is the lead author of the report, told Live Science.
The man’s inability to let go of digital things — and the fact that this inability affected his life in a negative way — led van Bennekom and her co-authors to suggest that digital hoarding should be “classified as a subtype of hoarding disorder,” which would make it possible for doctors to diagnose and treat digital hoarding as a mental health condition.
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