Logic does not apply.
I knew an old man who’s toilet was not broken, but he did not want to “over use” it. He saved his poop in plastic grocery bags in the house. He would not put it outside in the trash can because he was afraid the racoons would scatter it all over the yard. Then he would forget that he had bags and bags of poop all over the house.
Each little step made sense, to him, the end result was a house full of poop.
A 100% correlation; if a person’s mind worked in what we considered a normal and logical manner, they wouldn’t be hoarders in the first place.
The people you describe are way beyond horders, they’re psychotic. Unless you are telling me that all hoarders are psychotic.
If you read the book Stuff, you’ll see that there are different types of hoarders. What you describe are two types, but there are other types. The people who imbue objects with such meaning that getting rid of it means getting rid of a memory, or a person, or a relationship. Or it can even get to the point where the object itself seems to have feelings to them. Or, they just like stuff – they see beauty in objects and just have to have it.
It’s not that they don’t value space, and they understand that having a clean, uncluttered environment is desirable. But the attachment or compulsion is simply stronger. Even before it gets really bad, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the task at hand. Even when they recognize the problem and perhaps slow down the accumulation, the sheer physical task of clearing out can be overwhelming. Even then, it’s easy to get sidetracked. Making decisions about what to keep and what to get rid of, even when they are resolved to get rid of, are at best time-consuming and at worse crippling.
So really, it’s more than OCD (which some have, but not all), it’s more than just being “crazy” or illogical. In fact, they are sometimes quite logical, within their own internal logic system.
I know this isn’t actually about the show Hoarders, but I just watched the next-to-last episode from season three, the one with the lady (and I use that term loosely) with the chickens and goats in such dreadful conditions. What I cannot understand is that this woman is clearly mentally ill and it’s a clear case of animal abuse…and yet at the end she still has her animals. The end note said they were released from the “cages” which were little more than plastic bins with a metal grate on top, but she’s still allowed to keep them. There were dead and dying chickens all over the place! How in the world does she still have them and how is she not locked up in an institution anyway? She acted like she belonged in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre family! It seems like hers was more than just a case of hoarding. I hate to be ugly but DAMN.
I understand the hoarding mentality as far as everything holding a memory. I am trying so hard to let go of some of those sentimental treasures but sometimes I feel like the memory really will fade if I let them go. And I’m not ready to let them go! 
I don’t think you fully understand what the word psychotic means, in psychiatric terms.
While psychotics may hoard things, most hoarders do not suffer from psychosis. They can recognize reality, they just don’t like to deal with it, and deny it.
I’m realizing as you get older (my husband and I are in our 40s), things just…accumulate, too. You have to actively get stuff out of your house or every Christmas and birthday and shopping trip will end up with just a little bit more stuff in your house.
If you watch Clean House when they do the “Messiest House in America”, that’s pretty similiar. Not all of them are hoarders, but some of them come pretty damned close. (I can’t see how people would buy anything from those garage sales!)
BMalion: Oh. Dear. God.
rachelellogram, I saw that one too. He’s damned lucky that house didn’t go up in a blaze. Not to mention all the trees around his house would have caused it to spread to the entire neighborhood. Didn’t he keep insisting all of his books would be worth something, and that he was sitting on millions? Even if that had been true at one time (and I highly, HIGHLY doubt it), they’re under so much filth, it’s all ruined.
Are you talking about Hanna? Oh god, the ducks with the bleeding feet about broke my heart. She freaked when they told her that they had to be in a pond, rather than a cage. Not to mention the pregnant goat with the broken leg. 
I think animal control DID end up coming and taking away all of the animals. One bird ended up dying in one of the officer’s arms. I was almost crying.
I really can’t watch the animal hoarders.
I think the worse ones do have a sort of selective inability to see the reality of their problem. There are certainly hoarders who just cannot see the problem with filling their house with garbage.
Yes Guinastasia her name was Hanna! According to the end note they didn’t take them, they only released them from the cages but she kept them even though she was charged with improper containment of animals or something like that. I did cry about that one the animal expert held in her coat that they said died a few minutes later. I am a sucker for animals and that broke my heart.
The guy with the rabbits wasn’t quite so bad because they were at least running around everywhere and still in good health. The guy was a total jerk though.
But that woman Hanna, she seemed like something much more serious than hoarding was going on there.
I have a rule that I have to get rid of about as much volume as I bring in, on average. This serves me fairly well, as long as I remember “I brought in a bag of craft supplies, I need to go through things and give or throw away some stuff” on a regular basis. I’m not compulsive about it, but it’s a good guideline. Since making that rule, I’ll look at something that I want to buy, and try to figure out what I’d be able to get rid of.
This thread is very hard to read.
I realized as I was reading that I am living with a hoarder and every room is level 1 or 2.
Fear, embarasment, and anxiety can cause people to do pretty ridiculous, self-destructive things.
One friend of mine lived with his hoarder Aunt/cousins until recently. I was never in that house, but the garage was completely full of old/broken VCRs, PCs, scooters and such that left only a narrow pathway to the interior door. The garage door could not close and the stuff was exposed to the elements. It was such crap that nothing was stolen by the neighbors and this was a really BAD neighborhood.
Prior to this he shared an apartment with two of my other friends. There was a higher than average level of slob behavior (things left out or not cleaned up) but it was generally livable. However, there was a special situation. We’re table-top wargamers. That means having a lot of terrain like trees, roads, buildings, etc… laying around. The majority of the terrain or game pieces were put away in bins or on shelves so it was out of the way but collected serious dust. The real problem is all the stuff that one sees and thinks, “That would be a great bunker or terrain piece!” So they take it back to the apartment with the intent of making something out of it but never get around to it. So it all begins to pile up. I was suffering from this for a while too. But I stopped the whole terrain-building downward spiral once I realized I would never get around to finishing anything.
My current roommate was more than a bit of a slob. But when we moved out of that particular location, he moved in with the guy above for a year or two and it changed him. Now he lives with me again and he is WAY cleaner than he used to be. So yay, I guess.
I used to be a slob, so I can vaguely understand how it starts. But in my 20’s I just snapped. I realized how much I liked a clean, pleasant environment. It took work at first, but now I don’t even think about it.
I can see how my life would be different if I hung onto every scrap of cloth or doo-dad that I might use for a Halloween costume or craft project.
There but for the grace of God…
I was married to an alcoholic hoarder. Fun times.
Kitchen sink broken? No problem, do the dishes (when you need a clean dish) in the tub! Oh, you shower in there? No problem, just move the dirty nasty dishes to the other end of the tub!
Refrigerator really really really bad? Throw it away (full) and get a new one!
Sick stuff. Sad, but sick.
I’ve been learning over this Hoarders marathon that I am not so much a hoarder as my former SO was. I’m just sloppy and lazy. He kept things that don’t really make sense to keep. Piles and piles of it in the back yard especially.
Now that he’s gone (and because of the way he left: deported) I want to get rid of it all, but because I still feel something for him it has sentimentality attached for me too so it’s hard to trash.
I will though, dammit.
On one of those cleaning shows, they were helping a woman who wasn’t a hoarder (yet) but she was keeping certain useless things because of the emotions attached. Such as, keeping a broken TV because it was the first tv she bought after immigrating.
The cleaning ladies had her take photos of the objects so she would not feel she was throwing away the memories. After that she was able to throw them out. Maybe that would help you on some of your “stuff” that’s useless but sentimental.
That, and they might have been afraid of the aunt. Hoarder houses are another way nature says “do not touch”. There might have been an unspoken understanding that no one knew what that crazy b. might do if you touched any of her stuff, so don’t try it.
Shitting all over your house and leaving it there is a distortion of reality. I think I fully understand the definition.