Hoarding Disorder Assessment Tools
My everlasting gratitude to Dr. Gregory Chasson, a clinician with too many impressive accomplishments to list here, and The Philadelphia Hoarding Task Force for pointing me to several of these hoarding disorder assessment tools which were unfamiliar to me. I’m pleased to say that several of my colleagues and I pointed him to a resource in turn.
Hoarding disorder experts Drs. Gail Steketee and Randy O. Frost first published the Compulsive Hoarding and Acquiring Therapist Guide in 2007. One of the elements of the Guide is the Clutter Image Rating Scale, a series of photos showing several rooms in increasingly cluttered condition. Anyone can use it: a person who suspects s/he has the disorder or anyone attempting to help a person make that decision.
The Philadelphia Hoarding Task Force posts a brilliant interactive version of the Scale which lets you immediately rate your challenge.
The Home Environment Assessment Tool for Hoarding (HEATH©) created by Drs. Sheila Woody and Christiana Bratiotis, 2024, of the University of British Columbia, Centre for Collaborative Research on Hoarding.
Another excellent viewpoint is the HOMES® scale, published in the 2011 The Hoarding Handbook: A Guide for Human Service Professionals, by Dr. Christiana Bratiotis,
The Hoarding Rating Scale developed by Dr. David Tolin and a team provides another lens.
The Institute for Challenging Disorganization produced the Clutter-Hoarding Scale and the Clutter Quality of Life Scale.
Activities of Daily Living for Hoarding is an eye-opening instrument also formatted by Gail Steketee and Randy Frost.
There’s the Savings Inventory – Revised, another powerful Steketee instrument.
The Center for Hoarding and Cluttering, an astonishing resource in many dimensions, designed the Uniform Inspection Checklist “to objectively identify Harm Reduction targets, prioritize reasonable and relevant goals, set a baseline status, and monitor and measure progress throughout the resolution process.”
Apple even has a Clutter Image Rating Scale app.
Yes, even me too, sometimes!
Saving Myself from the Things I SavedLee Shuer, Mutual Support Consulting, is a Certified Peer Specialist providing guidance for decades, informed by lived experience, to people with hoarding disorder. He teamed with clinician Dr. Randy Frost to develop Buried in Treasures self-help and group protocols, and with Dr. Mary Ellen Copeland to develop the WRAP for Clutter program. These are only two of his gifts to the world.
And he’s added another. I had the huge pleasure of attending the July 2026 Annual IOCDF (International OCD Foundation) Conference hoarding presentations. Lee demonstrated a new tool, the Saving Myself from the Things I Saved Narrative Appraisal, a mechanism for self-pacing a person’s keep/let go appraisals of their possessions. I’ve never seen anything quite like it: it finetunes a person’s ability to ask questions about the emotional “value” of items more quickly, and perhaps accurately, than many other tools I’m familiar with. Lee explicitly wants this instrument shared as freely as possible: he’s printed “You may copy and share this document” right next to his trademark. That makes it priceless.
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