Stéphane Bern suffers from syllogomania. Focus on this mental illness with an expert in psychology.
- Hoarding is identified in 2-6% of the adult population.
- The prevalence is about 2% in adolescents with a slight predominance of the female sex.
“I have syllogomania: I keep everything and throw nothing away.” In an interview with Paris Match in 2020, the presenter of the programs Secrets d’Histoire and the Favorite Village of the French admitted to suffering from a mental disorder which clutters his interior.
“Old Delacre cookie tins”
“I secretly collect old Delacre cookie boxes. Those featuring the royal families, especially the Belgian royal family. I have about fifteen of them”, he says again. “My office is in a total mess, it’s full of life, but we don’t know where to walk anymore!”, he adds.
Hoarding should not be confused with the simple act of collecting objects, as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders explains: “People with syllogomania (pathological hoarding) always have such difficulty throwing away or parting with their belongings that objects accumulate and clutter living spaces to the point of making them uninhabitable. Unlike the collector, the syllogomaniac accumulates things in a disorganized manner and has difficulty parting with items of little value.”
“Saturated living space”
“It can be anything and everything! Objects of all kinds, bulky, useless, even dangerous”, says psychiatrist Jérôme Palazzolo, author of I free myself from my phobias (ed. Puf, 2016), in Better Living Health. “The person’s vital space ends up being saturated, affecting their daily social life: they no longer welcome anyone at home and no longer go to other people’s homes, for fear of then having to invite back… a major isolating factor”, adds the specialist. The syllogomania can even go “up to Diogenes syndrome, that is to say that the person does not even throw away their rubbish, neglects their hygiene and ends up living in unsanitary conditions”, he concludes.
