How To Recognize People With Plyushkin Syndrome - Crazy Characters

The image of Plyushkin from Gogol's poem "Dead Souls" has become a household name. This character's extreme stinginess extended even to himself. Are there such people among us and how to understand that a loved one has a tendency to collect?

The thrifty owner turns into a gatherer

It is important to note that the decline of the estate of the inimitable literary hero is preceded first by pathological changes in character, and then by a pathological decline in the personality status of the hero himself. Plyushkin was by no means born a “plushkin”: “… there was a time when he was only a thrifty owner! he was married and a family man, and a neighbor stopped by to dine with him, listen and learn from him about farming and wise stinginess."

Like most other landowners in Dead Souls, Plyushkin's estate was large enough, and he, "like a hardworking spider, ran busily, but promptly, at all ends of his economic web."

From a zealous and exemplary owner in his younger years (“mills, felting machines were moving, cloth factories, joinery machines, spinning mills worked”) Plyushkin, growing old, turned into a “spider” who lost his children and brought his once rich economy to complete ruin.

“Hay and bread rotted, baggage and haystacks turned into pure manure, even if you spread cabbage on them, the flour in the cellars turned into stone, and it was necessary to chop it, it was scary to touch the cloth, canvases and household materials: they turned into dust. He had already forgotten himself how many things he had …"

Everything at Plyushkin "became rotten and ripped, and he himself finally turned into some kind of rip in humanity."

Gradually, the intellect of the homely owner degraded, his thinking turned out to be permeated with suspicion, reaching a paranoid syndrome: Plyushkin considered all his relatives, neighbors and courtyards to be thieves and crooks; pettiness and stinginess acquired a pathological character.

Plyushkin's syndrome: main features

In connection with the brightness of the image described by N. V. Gogol, psychiatrists identified Plyushkin's syndrome in the clinical picture of psychiatric disorders, which is expressed in the obsessive pathological collection and accumulation of unused things. In this case, the patients themselves usually find their behavior rational - from their point of view - an explanation

Over time, this mental disorder progresses and acquires the character of a compulsion - an uncontrollable habit of collecting everything that comes to hand. And the mental disorder itself, when it reaches a clinical severity, as in the case of Plyushkin, is considered by some psychiatrists within the framework of obsessive-compulsive disorder, while others - as a separate disease. But in all cases it requires psychiatric treatment.

Who is prone to gathering

A similar mental disorder often occurs in older people in connection with cerebral atherosclerosis and a number of other organic brain damage (schizophrenia, dementia, chronic alcoholism).

Gogolevsky Plyushkin is not at all unique. 3% of people who have passed the 65-year mark, in one form or another, suffer from such a mental disorder

Speaking directly about Plyushkin, it is hardly legitimate to diagnose him with senile dementia. Gogol's character - from his bell tower, of course - made a very profitable deal for himself with Chichikov, while mercilessly bargaining in order to win "two kopecks" on each sold "dead soul".

His dialogue with Chichikov, permeated with outrageous avarice, and then farewell, serve as a kind of warning to all mortals: “a shriveled old man … even decided to give Chichikov a“pocket watch”for a bargain. But he changed his mind in time: “I'd rather leave them to him after my death, in the spiritual, so that he would remember me”.

Plushka's house … isn't he there, around the first corner?

Presumptive diagnosis: obsessive-compulsive disorder at an involutionary age

Read also:

• The menagerie next door. Who are animal collectors
• Diogenes syndrome - the desire to accumulate mountains of things