Speaking of Psychology: Why clutter stresses us out, with Dn. Joseph Ferrari, PhD

Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed by all your stuff? If so, you're not alone. In recent years, a thriving decluttering industry has sprung up to help us deal with our ever-accumulating piles of things. Dn. Joseph Ferrari, PhD, of DePaul University, talks about why we accumulate so much stuff and why we find it so hard to deal with it; what the research says about clutter, stress, and anxiety; and the best ways to get started clearing the clutter in your home.

Deacon Joseph Ferrari, PhD, is a professor of psychology and Saint Vincent DePaul Distinguished Professor at DePaul University in Chicago. He is a leading expert on the study of chronic procrastination and, more recently, of clutter. Ferrari studies the psychology of clutter, including why we accumulate it, how it affects our mental health, and the link between clutter and procrastination. He has published more than 400 scholarly articles and 35 books and book chapters, and is a fellow in six professional organizations, including APA. Ferrari is also a permanent deacon in the Catholic Diocese of Joliet, Illinois.

Kim Mills: Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed by all of your stuff? If so, you’re not alone. In recent years, a thriving decluttering industry has sprung up to help us all deal with our ever-accumulating piles of things—the stacks of books that don’t fit on our shelves, our kids' outgrown toys, our clothes that don’t fit anymore—our overstuffed closets and our garages are so full of clutter that they no longer fit our cars. How does all of this clutter affect us? In recent years, psychologist research has begun to find that living and working in cluttered spaces causes stress and anxiety and can harm both our mental health and our productivity. 

So why do we accumulate so much stuff and why do we find it so hard to deal with it? Does everyone find clutter equally stressful, or are some people happy living in spaces that might seem chaotic to others? What is clutter anyway? And how is living in clutter different from hoarding? Do men and women deal with clutter differently? How does clutter affect relationships? And if you want to clear the clutter in your home, what’s the best way to get started and to stick with it? 

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills. 

My guest today is Dr. Joseph Ferrari, a professor of psychology and distinguished professor at DePaul University in Chicago. Dr. Ferrari studies the psychology of clutter, including why we accumulate it, how it affects our mental health, and the link between clutter and procrastination. He’s also well known for his research on the causes and consequences of procrastination, and is the author of several books on that subject for researchers, clinicians, and the general public. He has published more than 400 scholarly articles and is a fellow in six professional organizations, including APA. In addition to his work as a psychology professor, Dr. Ferrari is also a permanent deacon in the Catholic Diocese of Joliet, Illinois. 

Thank you for joining me, Dr. Ferrari.

Joseph Ferrari, PhD: Well, first of all, thank you. As I heard your introduction, it touched on a number of topics that I can begin to jump in and share with you if you’d like, such as the difference between clutter and hoarding. They’re not the same. As you know, hoarding is a psychological disorder. And the way I conceptualize this, and one of the ways to look at this is, think of hoarding as lots of the same stuff—toilet paper, toilet paper, toilet paper, toilet paper. And clutter is breadth. So one is vertical and one is horizontal, if you would. So the person with clutter has lots of stuff. 

One of the other issues that you mentioned was, is it more common among one gender or the other? All right, let me answer that by sharing some of the background. Maybe a little over a decade ago, Dr. Catherine Roster from the University of New Mexico and I were at a conference, an annual meeting for the members of ICD. And so I’d like your listeners to reach out to your local ICD member. That stands for the Institute for Challenging Disorganization. They’re the professional declutters. They’re the coaches that you would hire if you have a clutter issue. They are the experts. Now, notice their organization doesn’t say the word clutter, because for them it’s all an issue of disorganization. And I’ll explore more of that in a moment. 

But anyway, Roster and I were there. I presented on procrastination. They wanted to know more. And afterwards, Catherine Roster comes to me and says, “Let’s collaborate.” And I said, “Great. I wanted to study the psychological home.” That’s another area. I’m a social community psychologist for listeners who are familiar, and I’m interested in what is the meaning of home for people. We travel. We can’t wait to go home. You eat me out of house and home. Home is something different than a dwelling. And she said, “Sure, let’s look at that.” 

Well, anyway, we collected our first study that came out in 2016 in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. And that data had about 1600 adults, but only 50 men. And so the first thing I did is I contacted the ICD people and said, “Wait a minute, is this skewed? Is there a gender difference?” And they said, “No, no, no. Men have clutter, but they don’t see it as clutter.” For men it’s, “My toys, it’s my stuff.” For women, our culture tells them, “You’ve got clutter.” So that’s very interesting. So the experts will tell you there is no gender difference, even though one may go seek assistance and the other one doesn’t. 

Mills: When does clutter become a problem for people? Why do some people find it stressful and other people can live in the middle of it and they’re fine? 

Ferrari: Yeah, there’s a tipping point, like so many things in life. When does it become procrastination and not just delay? There’s a point where things switch over from one to the other. The way Catherine Roster and I define a clutter, based on our 2016 paper, is it’s an overabundance of possessions that collectively can create chaos and disorderly living spaces. That’s a mouthful. I’m reading to you a definition. But this may answer your question. Overabundance. There’s just too much. You mentioned a moment ago, I’m a Catholic clergy, I am a deacon. And if I may for the moment, we’re not called to live as paupers. Christ never tells you that to do that. He said the problem isn’t abundance. It’s attachment to the abundance. That’s the problem. We don’t let go. So we have this overabundance of things, and it really creates a chaotic life and disorderly living. 

So from this, Roster and I have identified four areas where we look at clutter when we do these studies. Livability of the space, does the amount of stuff you have impact your livability, you can’t manage the physical space? Does it cause you distress? Is there emotional consequences from this? By having it, is there too much and it really distresses your life? Listeners and readers of my work will find that we found that there’s a negative correlation between life satisfaction and clutter. So the more clutter you have, the lower people report life satisfaction. Greater the stress. So here we are living in this consumer culture, but more and more, more. Buy, buy, buy. Well, you’re actually not living a good complete life because you’ll be less satisfied. 

A third area is it impacts relationships. We’ll talk about in a few minutes, why is it so hard to get rid of things? Because often we’re not the only owner. There’s often someone else. So it impacts relationships, causes lots of stress. And of course, financial wellbeing. There’s a study that was done that showed Americans have over $7,000 of unused stuff in their house. 

Mills: It’s a lot. 

Ferrari: $7,000. And then we wonder why people are a paycheck away from being on the streets, why credit cards are maxed out. Did you need $7,000 worth of stuff? And then I know you want to ask a question, but one more thing for the listener. The three areas that ICD members and we found that people have the most clutter is in the kitchen, in the closet and books. 

Mills: So let me ask you this, where does the propensity to clutter come from? Is it something that emerges in childhood or do you become a clutterer as an adult? And is it learned, so that if you had parents who maybe were tolerant of stuff or were cluttery themselves, does that make you a clutterer or not? 

Ferrari: You didn’t say, “And are you born a clutter?” No. We’re psychologists here, and we know that 98%, at least, I was always taught, of who you are comes from learning. The 2% is this is the biological. But we turn so much today for the biological base of things. So there’s no biology behind clutter. At least nobody has published that. But the answer to your question is we don’t know. You’re talking to half the scholars in the field. And knowing the other half, she doesn’t look at it. We have to look at that topic. I’m hoping someone’s listening and say, “Ooh, there’s my dissertation. There’s my master’s thesis. Ooh, there’s the honors thesis.” As an undergrad. Absolutely. Come join me at DePaul. We’ll do some great research together. 

The point is, we don’t know the development. Where does it come from? I mean, I’d love to look at minimalists, the complete opposite of the clutterer. Don’t know, don’t have any data on that that we know of. There were people ‘70s who looked at, Snooping was the name of a book, where people would look at people’s possessions, but never in the point of clutter. And again, I want people to understand we’re not talking hoarding. The TV show is called Hoarders, right? It’s not called Clutterers. It’s different. And again, as the ICD people would say, if it doesn’t impact your life, if you’re happy with having all that stuff, okay. It’s only when it impacts financially, relationships, like anything in life, you need to deal something with it.

Mills: So why is it so hard for people to declutter? When you recognize that maybe it’s taking over your life, but how do you get started? And I want to ask you about the whole Marie Kondo notion that we should keep the things that give us joy, right? I know you have views around that. 

Ferrari: Why is it so hard to declutter? All right, let me give you a few reasons. One, the items could be emotionally stressful. Now, not only negatively, as you probably thought by those words, but could be positive. That is to say it could be a trigger. When I pick the item up, it might bring me joy or happiness. Happiness, not joy. I may look at it, I say, “Oh, I remember that good time we had. I got to keep that.” Or I pick it up and I say, “Oh, yes, that was a really tough time in my life. That was some relationship, and I want to avoid it.” So it could be a trigger to something in the past. And that’s one of the reasons it’s harder to declutter because it brings back either positive or negative emotions. Again, another line of research could be, “Well, when is it one or the other? How can we predict that?” That’d be great. 

Also, it’s hard to declutter because there are, as it was said a few minutes ago, multiple users. Most of the time, the decision to keep or get rid of something is not just my own. Perhaps you have a partner. Perhaps you’re living with someone. Perhaps there’s someone else, others in your life. So you want to throw it away, but the other people say, “No, we need to keep it.” So it may not be your own decision. And getting rid of it would cause a conflict. Then the three lacks, I call it the three lacks, lack of time, lack of resources, and lack of ability. Lack of time. People say, “Yeah, this is great.” They’re listening to us today and they say, “Yeah, this is great. But...” As I talk about in my book on procrastination, the, “But, however...” factor. We are great excuse makers. “I’d love to do it, but I don’t have time.” 

Well, that sparked a study by Roster and I during COVID. Now you’re locked up. Now you can’t go anywhere. Now you have the time. Do your declutter. So we went to the ICD experts, their board of directors and did a focus group before we launched our study. And we said, “What do you think our people?” And they’re saying, “Oh yeah, our clients always said, ‘I’d love to declutter more, but I can’t.’ And now they’re home and they’re not.” That’s an excuse. That is yet another excuse. Because now that we’re forced to be home, we don’t. Now Roster and I collected data, and we have an article coming out in the Journal of Consumer Affairs, should be coming out shortly, I know it’s online already, where we find three types of people during COVID who decluttered. 

There were some who found it was exciting and energetic and loved it. There were some who found it as, “Well, it’s something I got to do, but I don’t enjoy it.” And then there was the other ones who just didn’t declutter. And those last two groups were much higher than the small group who enjoyed decluttering. So lack of time, a lack of resources. People will say, “I’d love to get rid of it, but I don’t know what to do with it. Where am I going to go with it? My kids don’t want the China. I can’t get rid of the old furniture.” And stuff like that. Again, good excuse making. My God, there are so many sources out there that are dying for resources. 

In my area here in the Joliet diocese, there’s an organization that will take your furniture and put it into a home of a new family who may need it. I’m thinking of the ones we donated. There was a woman whose husband was abusive. She finally left him. They helped set up an apartment for the woman and her kids. And we donated some of our furniture, as our kids have moved on. So your family doesn’t want it, other families may want it. Yes, exactly. You read in the paper, somebody’s house has burned down, a flood has hit over there. They don’t want your China, your kids. But that family would love to have those dishes. So leave a legacy is what I say in my ministry. Leave a legacy, make a difference in other people’s lives. And it may not be your own family’s, but in others. 

Lack of time, lack of resources, and lack of ability. Many people say they don’t know what to do. That’s where the decluttering coaches come in. They’re not necessarily psychologists. They may not necessarily even have a master’s degree, but they’re just people who are trained. The ICD group does lots of certifications for people who know how to organize and declutter, which takes me to the quote you gave me. “Touch it and keep it if it gives you joy.” Well, I struggle with that quote. Let’s look at the data. We’re scientists here. Consumer psychologists, as Roster has taught me, will tell you, if you touch something in the store, you are more likely to buy it. You’re more likely to keep it. And that is the reason why retailers, companies in stores will put things eye level for you so that you can see it and you can buy it. They pay extra to be eye level than to be lower or higher. So they want you to touch the item. If you touch it, you’re more likely to buy it. So you’re more likely to keep it. 

Decluttering coaches would say to you, “Don’t run out and buy a bin and start throwing stuff in the bin. Organize.” That’s where they’re called the institute for Challenging Disorganization. Organize, and look and see, “Wow, I have six spatulas. Hey, geez, 15 pairs of blue pants. Wow, look at all these things that I have.” And then you bring in a coach or a good friend, and they have them hold it. Because if they have found, if I touch it as the client, I’m more likely to keep that pair of pants. So the data and the experts say, don’t touch it. When this first hit the press, and there was a Netflix show on all of this, a lot of reporters came to me and said, “What do you think?” 

I remember talking to a Japanese reporter who said, “What do you think of this expression?” And I said, “I got to tell you, the first half,” I told them. I said, “But this joy, joy is a deep emotion.” Listeners, you know this as psychology listeners. Joy is not the same as happiness. Happiness is a mood. Emotions are deeper. We sing every Christmas Joy to the World, not Happiness to the World. So there’s something more to it there. And the Japanese reporter said, “You’re right. In Japanese, the word is happiness. It’s been translated to joy because joy sells books.” So I got issues with this expression. Don’t touch it. If it gives you momentary happiness, okay, but keep what gives you joy, what’s deep. 

You don’t need 18 snow globes. Maybe you can get away with four, three, less. You don’t need every piece of artwork your kids did for you. Maybe you could pick up the key one of each age or something like that. Again, no one’s saying live like a pauper. The Hindu monks spend seven years getting rid of everything they own, except for two robes, two bowls and two spoons. Try going on a cruise with just that. It’s impossible. We keep too much. But we’re in this consumer society. Buy, buy, buy. More, more, more. Got to have the latest, got to have the newest. What’s happened is we’ve made our wants needs. We’ve made what we want to have as, “You got to have. It’s a need.” And if you don’t have it, oh, you’re not fine. You’re not perfect. 

Mills: Let me switch to digital clutter, because I know that’s something that you’ve started studying. So these files and documents and photos and emails that we all have clogging up our computers and our cloud drives, does that kind of clutter affect us the same way emotionally, psychologically as the physical stuff? 

Ferrari: Currently, we’ve moved beyond the looking at clutter in the home. We have a number of studies of clutter in the office that we did pre-pandemic, but we published it during the pandemic. One can find those articles. So then we’ve moved into now e-waste and digital clutter. So you ask a good question. By e-waste, I mean electronic waste. How many old laptops and cell phones, and the old wires that you might have, and desktops. There’s a Swedish company that found on average people have three old cell phones on average that they don’t use anymore. So we’ve started to look at what impact does that have. Again, as a social community psychologist, I see that relevant to climate and climate control and climate things. How does it impact my community, my setting, my area of living? So we are starting to do that. We have some early pubs. 

We have data on digital clutter. This is all the electronic email messages that you have. But to be quite honest, we haven’t answered it yet. It’s very hard to find doctoral students or even masters who want to study this stuff. So I have more data than I have the ability to analyze at this point. But we’re starting to do that. All I can say is I’m old enough to remember when dot matrix computers were around and those kinds of things, and we heard, “Well, email will save us paper. We won’t have to print a paper anymore.” Well then people of my generation, you made a hard copy and you still kept it electronically. You didn’t get rid of any of this, because you could see this better because the font was too small. So we never got rid of stuff. And so now you have all these files. 

What recommendation would I give? This is common sense. Do a triage for a lot of stuff. In other words, go through your emails and look, “What do I need and what do I need? Don’t need it. Don’t need it. Don’t need. Don’t need it.” I don’t do instant messaging. I don’t do texting or Snapchat or Tickety Tok or any of that other stuff. But I will sometimes put my message in the email address, short little line so people can see right there, so they don’t have to open up the whole thing. And they know exactly what I want. And I don’t mean just subject line. I mean literally, “Make sure you call this person please.” Something like that. So you want to do some things like that. So we need to be briefer and more succinct I guess, in some of these things. But yes, we have to learn what’s going on. The question you may want to ask, is the person with home clutter the same as digital clutter? Great question. Don’t know that yet. Is it the same person? If I have one, do I have the other? My gut says yes, but I don’t have the data. 

Mills: Well, let me change gears and ask you this one. I don’t know if you know the answer to this, but I bet you have an opinion. Is there a generational difference in how people deal with clutter? Because there have been a lot of articles about how baby boomers are trying to downsize and how the millennial, gen Z children don’t want their stuff. So do younger people have less clutter as a result of that, or do they just have different clutter? 

Ferrari: I actually have a high school student who’s on my research team, and she’s looking at a bedroom clutter among high school students. I’m here in Chicago and she’s in New York. And that’s first person ever looking at what do we know about younger people and teenagers and their clutter. What she has found hot off the press that she’ll be presenting at the Eastern Psychological Association conference along with my team in Boston this year, what she found is that they do have clutter. But see, it’s a question of perception too. To many people, “It’s not clutter. It’s my stuff. It’s important to me.” The question is that it’s that overabundance and it’s okay to have a lot, as long as it isn’t impacting your relationships, your livability space, your finances. Let’s not demonize people. And I’m not doing that. I’m simply saying, “Ask yourself, is this in the way?” 

Now, I can share with you, if I may, what my wife does. I have kids in their thirties, and what do we do? Whenever they come to visit? They have to take something from their bedroom back home, just one thing. Just one thing. They don’t visit too often, but anyway, they have to take one thing. The other thing is when Christmastime comes, she will buy something new for them, of course, but she’ll look for something in the house that’s gently used and that’s related to that. It’s another way. So there’s slow ways we can get rid of things because we have to learn to do that. It’s easy to accumulate. 

Is there generational differences? I would suspect probably. Because I have three kids and my son’s the minimalist. “If I don’t use it in four to six months, I get rid of it.” His sisters, not so much. They probably keep. So I think there is differences. I don’t think we can just say it’s generation. I don’t think you got to look at characteristics. What do we know about the person and those backgrounds? Same parents, and yet one does it one way and one does the other. It’s not genetic. 

Mills: So if somebody wants to declutter, they recognize that they maybe are on the verge of having a problem, but they don’t have the wherewithal to bring in a professional, how should they approach getting rid of stuff? 

Ferrari: Okay, as these experts would say, organize. Sort it all out and see. Let’s go back to my example, 15 pairs of blue pants. It’s a high number. So you’re look and you see, “Wow, I have all these pants.” Now, one thing you’ll say to yourself is, “Hope runs eternal. Maybe it’ll come back in style.” Well, that pair pants is from 1981. And you’re right, it may come back in style, but you and I know it’ll come back a little different. Retailers aren’t stupid. They’re going to make the product new. Retro, but new. So now the cuff might be a little bit different, or the collar a little bit different. So you wear that 1981 thing and they’ll know you are from 1981. And you don’t want to do that. So don’t sell yourself that one. “You never know, it might come back.” 

The other thing is, “You never know, I might need it again.” But you don’t need 15 of them. You don’t need six spatulas. You can get away with two. For a number of years, I would go around to Catholic parishes and I would talk about what are we called as Christians to do with stuff? And the title was A Cluttering Christian, and Stuff Ain’t Saintly. And then I would have a decluttering coach from my local area talk about the last half how to declutter. And I’ve learned lots of good stuff. That’s what she always said, “Don’t go out and buy a container box sort, and put it in order and ask yourself, do you need this?” 

And one of the examples she always gave was every Thanksgiving, she needs this particular cookware thing. But instead of buying it, she has a friend who happens to have it. And so they rotate it. Maybe another thing you can do is take some item and rotate it around. So you don’t want to get rid of it. It’s been in your house, but maybe you don’t need it that often and somebody else can use it. And so you rotate it around. We can be clever, we can be creative. We’re smart people. We’re humans. We can do these things. So again, if you don’t know where to begin and you can’t afford a coach, that’s fine. Bring in a good friend who will not let you make excuses and will hold you accountable and say, “Sorry, we got to get rid of a third of these.” Or something like that. And keep what you want. And then ask yourself, “Do we need to do it?” 

It’s tiring. It’s exhausting. As we said, it could be an emotional trigger, but we know that the more clutter leads to more depression, more mood disorders. As I said earlier, lower psychological wellbeing, life satisfaction, negative emotions about the self. People with lots of clutter do lots of self devaluing the data shows. We didn’t do this study, but a study had been done that found it’s related to over consumption of unhealthy foods. So people with lots of clutter tend to eat a lot maybe junk food more. I know I’m painting a stereotypic image here of the couch potato. But look at our culture. Now, I can just sit there and with a remote, “I’ll buy that. I’ll buy that. I’ll buy that. Oh, and you’re going to deliver it to me tomorrow in 24 hours. I’ll get it. Free shipping. Whoa.” Well, of course we’re going to buy more because there’s that as much effort than it used to be. 

So we sit around more, we do less, and lower quality of life. So there’s lots of negative impacts from having clutter. It’s not a positive thing. Again, don’t be a minimalist. I’m not saying live with nothing. Don’t be a Hindu monk. You don’t have to do that. But you should be able to live with less and ask yourself why, “Do we really need this? Have I been sold to this bill of goods that my life will be better if I have the newest and the latest phone?” 

Mills: I’m going to change gears again and talk about the connection between people who clutter and people who procrastinate. What is that connection? Can you explain how they’re related to each other? 

Ferrari: Okay, I know you’ve had a recording already, so I don’t want to go too much on what procrastination is and is not. But it’s not time delay. It’s not poor time management. A meta analysis was done, I’m sure this was covered, or your listeners know what a meta analysis is, and they found the most effective technique for dealing with procrastination is not time management. In fact, that’s the least effective. Cognitive behavioral therapy is what works most, CBT if you’re a procrastinator. 

So it’s an interesting link between procrastination and clutter, and we’ve published a few studies on that. One form of procrastination is decisional procrastination. That’s the cognitive form. Indecision is an interesting strategy that people use because they did some publications, experimental studies looking at is it a cognitive deficit? Is it that people who are indecisive just can’t make the decision? Or is it motivational? And of course, a variety of tasks, it came up motivational. So people choose to be indecisive. But it’s a great strategy. Let’s take an example. I live in the western suburbs of Chicago, outside of Naperville and Aurora, Illinois. And in Aurora, there’s a 31 movie multiplex, 31 movies. Now imagine you go to the movie with your indecisive friend and you stand there with 31 options. What will they tell you? You say, “Come on, we got to pick a movie.” And what will they tell you, Kim? 

Mills: “I don’t know. Well, there are too many for me to choose.” 

Ferrari: “Yeah, I know, I know.” You say to them, “But we got to make a decision.” What will they tell again tell you? 

Mills: “Well, what’s the next one that’s playing? Let’s go see that.”

Ferrari: Oh, that’s good. That’s decisive. No, the true indecisive will say, “Well, geez, I don’t know. I don’t know. They all look good.” And then you say, “Well, I chose last time.” And they’ll say, “Well, that’s okay.” And then you look at your watch and you say, “It’s 7:00 and they’re all starting in 10 minutes. Which one? So you make the decision.” Now that’s brilliant. Why? Well, when you leave the movie, if the movie was good, both of you say, “Nice.” But what if the movie was a stinker, it was a bomb. What would your indecisive friends say to you? 

Mills: “Your fault. You chose it.” 

Ferrari: “Why did you make me waste that money?” See, so they never come across bad. They never come across as a poor decision. So indecision is a very clever strategy that people will use. If I never make the choice, I can never be blamed. If I didn’t pick the car, it’s not my fault. If I didn’t choose the dining room table. It’s not my fault. “I didn’t want that refrigerator anyway.” The problem is indecisives have to realize that, okay, you have the right not to decide but if someone else made that decision, I’m from New York, we would say, “Shut up.” We would say, “Come on. You had the choice. And you chose not to, and you have every right not to make the decision. You let me do it. You empowered me, then you live with it.” 

In terms of clutter, the person who’s cluttered is very indecisive, and that makes sense. If I don’t choose whether’s to keep it or not, and I let somebody else finally say, “We’re getting rid of it.”, if in the rare time it’s sometimes nine months later, “I wish we had that.” “Well, you threw it out. I didn’t make that decision.” So you never come across looking bad. So there’s lots of relationship. So we’ve looked at indecision and clutter. We’ve looked at in the workplace, what impact people in the office who tend to be more indecisive, who also have more office clutter. Just a whole bunch of stuff. We’ve probably got about 20 pubs, 18, 20 pubs now. But yeah, fascinating. I like to go into areas where others haven’t done any research. That’s why I started in ‘88, ‘89 on the first studies on procrastination, some of the first, because there was nothing in the field. 

Mills: Let’s see if we can wind up with question regarding what you’re working on now, what are the big questions that you would like to be able to answer? 

Ferrari: I’m doing more than just looking at clutter myself right now. I have a graduate student and she’s looking at what kinds of resources in communities are there for senior citizens. That’s going to be her doctoral dissertation. She’s been studying part of community psych. What are the resources? How do we empower people? Another one of my students who is an international student from Malta, he’s looking at what is the meaning of psychological home, the meaning of home for migrants and immigrants, particularly immigrant students? You’re coming here for a short period of time and you’re studying, what does home mean to you? How does it change? What does it impact? 

Very exciting study that I’m starting to do is in rural healthcare, there’s an organization called St. Mary’s Clinic that serves people in Kentucky and Tennessee in Appalachia. And this fall, I was blessed to have the opportunity to go on a trip through a group called Catholic Extension. One of the things we saw was this big mobile health clinic that goes around to people in Appalachia. You know the mobile homes that people buy and the sides come out? Well, imagine that where you’ve got two examining rooms and a pharmacy and offices in there, all this in this mobile unit. And so they’ll go to and deal with 400 patients that are in rural settings. So I’m looking at, as a community psychologist, and I have a doctoral student looking at this, what are the needs of those communities? Let’s evaluate the program? I’m trying to get my university’s nursing and healthcare professions, I’m in the College of Science and Health, involved with doing this. We’re in an urban setting in Chicago, but there are rural needs too. So we’re doing assessments of that. 

I just love all those kinds. There’s so many questions that we are out there to ask that improve the quality of life for people, and that’s what we need to be doing. So I spent a lot of time early in my career doing work on procrastination, but always did work in community psych, blood donating, litter. I have the only studies to get people to buckle up their children in shopping carts. Buckle up your baby. Yeah, 23,000 kids are hurt a year in shopping cart accidents. Then I had NIH grants looking at a wonderful concept with a colleague called Oxford House for people in recovery from substance abuse and alcoholism. It’s a live-in 12 step, if you would. No therapist, no training. And yet we found 85% of the people stay clean and sober two years later. Most treatment programs, you’re lucky if you get 10%. I did that for 13 years. 

So lots of questions. I think that’s the joy of being an academic. You can ask lots of questions in lots of different areas. And I just asked my colleagues, I love basic research, I’m trained as an experimental social, but also let’s make a difference and leave a legacy and make a difference in other people’s lives. I hope this podcast has done that for your listeners. I hope some people have heard, among all my ramblings, some kernel of information that they can use to make their life a little bit better. 

Mills: I think you did achieve that. I want to thank you, Dr. Ferrari, for joining me, and it’s been a lot of fun and really interesting. So thank you so much. 

Ferrari: Thank you for having me. It’s good to be had. 

Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you’ve heard, please leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan. 

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.