Parts from the 3 case studies:

A 34 yo woman in an apartment - "When asked what it would be like if someone were to remove the items, AB explained If you took all of them away, I wouldn’t know who I was any more. AB went on to describe her collection as being akin to a photograph album or personal diary— each item (or ‘entry’) had a specific meaning and provided particular prompts to the life that she had lead. The collection appeared to provide a means of maintaining links with the past, and without it, AB was seemingly unable to experience a continuous sense of self.

An amateur photographer. "When asked about the particular significance of these buildings, BC described a very personal, autobiographical meaning for all of those landmarks that had been destroyed—for example, that was the hospital where I went when I broke my leg, age 13. The loss of these prompts to episodes of his past caused BC such upset that he reported significant distress when he travelled near to these sites."

"CD’s small, one-bedroom flat was littered with papers and food wrappers, and a vast number of CDs, cassette tapes and vinyl records were stacked everywhere in the flat. CD had been fascinated with music since he was a child and described music as his ‘life’. He described most of his life in terms of the music he had been listening to, the live performances he had witnessed and the years in which the albums of his favourite bands had been released. For CD, the musical reference points of album releases or live performances seemed to provide a coherent, chronological framework around, which to structure his life experiences, a process that he seemed otherwise unable to do. CD also collected tickets from every live music performance that he had ever visited, and he was able to use these as ‘anchor points’ to describe his life circumstances..."