Educational Media Reviews Online

This 20 minute film is a glimpse inside the lives of compulsive hoarders. Using the cases of three likeable individuals, the directors have ventured into their cluttered world full of “stuff.” Two of the three hoarders in the film live in extreme conditions, complete with narrow passageways built through their living quarters, framed by all their belongings. One can’t help but think this cannot be a fun way to live, yet the people in the film don’t seem particularly distressed about their surroundings. In fact, there’s an upbeat mood to the film.

Stuffed touches on the reasons people tend towards hoarding behaviors. It looks at the difference between collectors and hoarders, and mentions new research that points towards a physiologic reason for the disorder—studies that are beginning to correlate a connection between the brain’s prefrontal cortex and hoarding behavior. The hoarders in the film realize what they’re doing is abnormal, yet it helps them cope with a variety of anxieties in their lives.

Stuffed will work well as a discussion starter in the classroom. While it shows the incredible living conditions that some people have created and endure, it really only skims the surface of the underlying reasons for the condition. This disorder is in the forefront of pop culture today, with episodes of The Oprah Winfrey Show devoted to it and the Style network’s reality series Clean House among the television options for observing cluttered homes and lives. Stuffed fits into that genre just fine, but just doesn’t go quite deep enough for it to be a necessary purchase for academic libraries. Recommended with reservations.