(TYSON SCHROEDER ILLUSTRATION)
DANIEL KLEIN
If we could cure hoarding...
"Long seen as an eccentricity or a facet of obsessive-compulsive disorder, severe hoarding is now increasingly viewed and studied as a mental health problem in its own right. . . . Initial studies suggest that antidepressants offer little help for hoarding. More research has yet to be done trying other types of drugs . . ." -- The Boston Globe, April 2
"WE'VE COME to depend on serendipity in pharmacological research," says GlaxoSmithOrElse chemist Helmut "Snoopy" von Winkler. "While developing a blood pressure medication, Upjohn hit on Rogaine, the hair restorer. And working on a treatment for angina,
Leditgo{trade} , a synthetic gamma-unblocker, was discovered in von Winkler's laboratory in Geneva last December.
"In a pilot trial group of 13 constipatees , only three experienced relief of their symptoms," reports von Winkler. "But after washing down their pills, 11 of the subjects spontaneously tossed their little paper cups of water out the window! That's when I knew I was on to something big."
Just how big? All 13 subjects went home and immediately cleaned out their closets, jettisoning not only every article of clothing bought more than six months previous, but diaries, love letters, their children's pottery class projects, National Geographics, Monkees records, matchbook and postcard collections, unmatched socks, and unpaid bills. In follow-up interviews by Dr. Ingrid Pfaff, a GlaxoSmithOrElse psychologist, every subject rated him or herself as a 9 or 10 on the Wilhelm Himmelfarb-Blintz Feeling-Groovy Scale.
"Typically, they felt a profound sense of catharsis," says Pfaff. "Some said they felt born again, unfettered, and free. And every one of them asked for more doses of the stuff."
GlaxoSmithOrElse soon encountered an unexpected setback: a lawsuit by the Highway Storage Unit Association claiming unfair business practices. Geneva Superior Court Judge Rudolf Himmelfarb-Blintz (no relation to Wilhelm) dismissed the claim.
Still, the far-reaching implications of Winkler's discovery remained unidentified until GlaxoSmithOrElse launched a four-country, 1,000 -subject, controlled study of Leditgo{trade}.
"At first, we only had anecdotal evidence," says Pfaff. "A divorce here, a disinheritance there."
"But it was not long before a pattern emerged of what we call 'wholesale de-hoarding,' " continues von Winkler. "Test subjects were not just clean ing their closets; they were purging their entire homes of no-longer-wanted items, particularly from their bedrooms."
Old mattresses and broken bed lamps were the first to go, but shabby husbands and worn-out lovers soon followed. In a number of cases, slacker offspring were tossed out and left at the curb with other detritus. Again, test subjects expressed a feeling of radical relief. As subject No. 659 wrote, "When you think about it, there's no end to the crap you want to let go of in your life."
Soon thereafter Pfaff and von Winkler teamed up with the editorial board of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual , the psychiatric profession's definitive listing of mental disorders. Clearly, Leditgo{trade} had the potential to correct an immense variety of unwanted psychological symptoms.
"Our timing was perfect," Pfaff recounts. "Road rage and self-defeating personality disorder are so 20th century. Wholesale hoarding was a disorder just waiting for a pill to cure it."
The inability to let go of stale, unsatisfying relationships was just the tip of the symptomatic iceberg blasted by Leditgo{trade}. The team determined the drug also can aid sufferers of obsessive composting disorder, hanging-on-to-old-grudges disorder, and compulsive historical memory disorder.
Says Pfaff, "We are currently experimenting with mega-doses of the compound administered to a cohort of 32,000 Serbian nationalists. If all goes as predicted, they'll finally let go of their hard feelings over the Battle of Kosovo in 1389."
"Next, we're contemplating a similar experiment in the Middle East," says von Winkle. He pauses a moment before adding, "Have they ever given the Nobel Medicine Prize and the Nobel Peace Prize to the same person?"
Daniel Klein is the author of "Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes," coming out this month. 
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
