Frost, also the Smith College Harold and Elsa Siipola Israel professor emeritus of psychology, developed the course with Lee Shuer, who now facilitates it around the world.

Shuer helps others to work on themselves through the Buried in Treasures program, and he admits that his own house is a work in progress.

Shuer, a certified peer specialist and hoarding disorder expert, said he never calls anyone a “hoarder.”

“If you’re trying to build trust and rapport, it’s often such a turn-off. I self-identify as a finder-keeper in recovery, but a lot of people use collector, archivist, environmentalist, prepper.

“But it doesn’t matter what we call it — we want to call it getting better.”

Shuer started “collecting” at school, as children often do. “I didn’t abandon that phase,” he said. “Suddenly we weren’t getting together to trade stickers and baseball cards. They were at parties, and I was reading comic books by flashlight at 3 in the morning, miserable.”

In hindsight, he realizes he began to develop signs of depression in his teens and that the “treasure hunting” ramped up in his 20s.

“It was a self-soothing coping skill for my extreme ups and downs with bipolar disorder and ADD (attention deficit disorder). As my mental health challenges continued to manifest and become more significant, so did the maladaptive coping skills.”

Like others, Shuer’s collections were broad, but he was particularly interested in video games, especially once he realized their social currency.

“I went from being an awkward outsider to being interesting because of my stuff,” he said. It was only with therapy that he really began to understand that dynamic.

Shuer now keeps his most prized collections, including these vintage collectible cards in an orderly fashion.

Shuer has been gradually working on the clutter in different areas of his house and says it's important to "celebrate the incremental changes."

“I realized Space Invaders was the key memory I have from the day of my grandfather’s funeral. I was dropped off at a family friend’s house and remember playing that.”

That realization triggered a “wave of emotion,” he said. The video games were “an example of all the things around me that represented unresolved grief, guilt, loss.”

Shuer described hoarding as “intention without opportunity,” suggesting most of those with the condition are well intentioned and plan to use the stuff for good, though often it doesn’t work out that way.

“The misunderstanding is that people love their stuff more than their family,” he said. The truth, he said, is that most of those affected are trying “to be a good person, not a bad person.”

They need help and understanding, which is what their peers can give them, Shuer said.

The success of Buried in Treasures comes down to the social interaction with their peers, which enables people to open up in a reassuringly safe environment, he said.

“Learning the skills and being treated with respect like this is really empowering. You’re also receiving that positive reinforcement that you’re not some kind of social pariah and you’re not crazy,” Shuer said.

“By the end of the course people often feel hopeful and that for the first time they have a chance. I believe that if you care enough and you want it bad enough, you can change anything. That was definitely a motivator for me.”