Jeanine Ritchie would be considered a hoarder by many people’s standards. Her home of 11 years is filled with neatly stacked piles of things she can’t throw away.

Jeanine Ritchie will tell you everything serves a purpose in her Midtown home. The box full of empty energy drink bottles. The container overflowing with stuffed animals. The hundreds of pill bottles. The stack of empty Tidy Cat litter containers. The stray scraps of wood.

“Lots of things I’ve had a long time that I really cherish for one reason or another,” Ms. Ritchie said from her cluttered yet clean and orderly living room while she watched two television sets at once, with the volume turned way up.

Eleven years’ worth of living at the same address can pile up quickly. Stuff piled up so quickly, in fact, that it once took a group of social workers to help her clear some of it out.

But she needs all those stuffed animals because her mixed-breed living companion, Luke, likes to play with them all. She collects scraps of white pine because she likes to build things. The Tidy Cat containers? They’re to hold more stuff.

Not much gets thrown away. Nothing gets lost.

“If I can’t find them one day, they’ll come up another day,” Ms. Ritchie said.

Pack rats. Junkaholics. Collectors. Hoarders. There’s a variety of names for people who accumulate things. The reasons are just as varied.

Some experts claim it’s a holdover from Depression-era thinking, where you never threw anything away because you never knew when you’d need it. Some consider hoarding a symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder. Still others say it’s a combination of both, as well as other factors.

“Most people think it has to do with a subset of obsessive compulsive disorder, but I think there can be an overlap with depression,” said Dr. Shirley Taylor, a licensed psychologist with Heartland Health Counseling Services.

She added that most people who hoard are also isolated in terms of family, friends and relationships. They substitute things for people.

“It provides them with a sense of security to have all this stuff, just like having another person can provide you with a sense of security,” Dr. Taylor said.

Randy Frost, a psychology professor at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., said most hoarders tend to be articulate and well-educated. They have sophisticated reasons for their collecting habits and tend to personify things.

“They apply emotions to a range of things that others would consider worthless,” Mr. Frost said in USA Today.

The real hazards of hoarding perhaps come through safety issues. People can accumulate so much stuff that it becomes both a fire and health hazard.

Walt Hughes, St. Joseph city code enforcement manager, said his office comes across about two or three cases a year where someone has accumulated a lot of items in the home and it becomes a hazard. He said the city usually becomes aware of it through interior inspections, at times generated by police and social service agency visits.

“It’s not something we’re dealing with every day,” Mr. Hughes said. “Actually, it’s gone down.”

He said some of the worst cases he’s seen is where there is no pathway in the house from one room to another. There usually is no clear way to get to the bathroom or kitchen.

Dr. Taylor said many people, including herself, have some hoarding tendencies. It may be a leftover trait from primitive times, when our ancestors had to deal with shortages.

But for most people, the rational brain kicks in and keeps this primitive tendency in check.

Dr. Taylor also said Ms. Ritchie might be more of a collector than a hoarder. Most hoarders, in her experience, are not as organized as Ms. Ritchie, she said.

“My hunch is, a year ago it was a lot better than it is today, and it’s a lot better today than it will be in another year,” Dr. Taylor said.

Alonzo Weston can be reached at alonzow@npgco.com.