The A&E program *Hoarders *is a guilty pleasure of mine. I should like to think I watch it for the (usually) uplifting endings; it is reassuring to see that there is redemption even for those who have gone so far beyond the pale. More realistically, I watch it to encourage myself to clean house. I realize that I become inured to the little messes after a while, and the show allows for a bit of dishabituation. I’ll also admit to a bit of morbid fascination, which I imagine you all have guessed.
Tonight as I sat watching the most recent episode, something transpired that I never would have guessed could be engendered from a simple television program:
I threw up.
Youmay watch the programif you wish. All I can say is that it would be difficult to fathom a more viscerally disgusting example of the medium. All that was missing was a visit from Jerry Sandusky. (And, yes, I realize that my forming that phrase has likely summoned the spirit of Clement Moore to be a muse to some present-day jaded scribbler. I take full responsibility.)
If I were not an atheist before, this would have done it.
I watch Hoarders and its counterpart, Hoarding: Buried Alive, as cleaning motivation and preventive therapy myself (DH and I both have some packrat tendencies).
I’m VERY relieved that Shanna’s no longer living on her own. She’s simply too disconnected from reality to do so safely. How she’s managed to not make herself extremely ill, I have no idea.
This was one of those episodes where I’m very glad TV only offers sight and sound, no smell.
Believe it or not, this isn’t the undisputed peak of gross for this show, IMO, unless I’m misremembering which of the hoarding shows it was that had a husband/wife pair who both had severe problems, including a stream of sewage running through part of the house.
There was another season opener - Ruby, maybe? Who had a latrine of poop bags filling a stairway to the second floor, one of those enclosed staircases with a door at the bottom. She would just open the door, fling the bag, and close the door. Matt had that cleanup, and IIRC it was the introduction of full hazmat suits for the show.
This one was worse by a long shot, IMO.
Is it me, or does this season seem a bit more “feel good” with the introduction of attempting to stay the night in the hoards by Matt and Cory - which have yet to be successful - and somehow the mid-cleanup meltdowns haven’t seemed so awful. It hasn’t been hard at all in previous seasons to be dismissive of the subjects of a lot of the episodes, and a good majority of them were really unlikeable. I haven’t gotten too frustrated with the hoarders so far this season, and I think it might be they’re slanting the editing a little more favorably this time. Maybe there’s a little more emphasis on therapy or something.
I was also thinking the hoards weren’t as bad so far this season, until now!
I so wanted to hear someone tell that poor poop woman, “You’re the Poop Lady. You need to understand that you are the Poop Lady. When you go to the food pantry and everyone goes quiet and you get in and out so fast, and people let you go ahead of them, it’s because you’re the Poop Lady. They can smell you from a block away, and they want you out of there as quickly as possible. All those watery eyes are not from relief and joy for getting donated food. It’s because the Poop Lady has arrived and the smell is making their eyes water. It’s you, Shanna!”
I think I saw the episode you are referring to not too long ago…their floors and rugs were wet when they stepped on them, and then they found their dead cat behind the TV. Does that sound right? If so, that was the other show Hoarding: Buried Alive.
But this episode (I thought) was much worse than that one. The endless jugs of waste that they had to open each one and empty. This is the only episode I can remember having to turn away from watching. And was actually screaming at the TV when she kept insisting that the smell was from mold in the house. I can’t imagine being one of her neighbors. Luckily Dr Zazio has no sense of smell which is a great advantage for some of these houses.
For some reason I thought the repeat they showed right before it (Doug with the brain injury and the woman with the husband and two sons that died in the house) was the season premiere because it was the first time I saw someone try to sleep in the house for a night before the cleanup, and they also repainted both interiors which I don’t remember seeing before either.
One of the people who appeared on the first episode is my mother’s neighbor, and was (and probably still is) a frequent customer at the restaurant I used to manage. (From what I read, our store’s soda cups were about knee-high in part of his residence.)
I’ve never watched the show, but the fact that the state his apartment was in doesn’t even get mentioned in comparison to stuff in later episodes - now that’s some nightmare fuel.
Was it worse than the lady with the pile of shit in her toilet? The pile was taller than her and I was left wondering how in the hell she scaled that mountain to poop every day.
I’m sure there’s no legal obligation here, but surely, morally, there’s a strongly felt obligation not just to clean these guys’ houses but to get them real help of some kind.
Childhood accident. I have her book The Hoarder in You, which incidentally is very good, and in it she mentions that she has a very limited sense of smell as a result of a childhood horseback riding accident.
Posts 6 and 7 in this thread have done as thorough a job as I care to see.
Honestly, I looked up this episode for the OTHER profile–the millenial lady who was ostensibly hoarding so her things could be used by those left behind when she was taken up in the Rapture. As the show went on, it became apparent that this was probably an excuse for more garden-variety hoarding.
They do. The show provides up to six months of aftercare funds so that the hoarders can seek professional counseling with no financial obligation. Many of the hoarders refuse the offer of further help, however.
Her creepy little smile when she described her unraptured relatives needing her hoarded supplies was, I found, a tad more unsettling than the poo-bottle lady.
Yeah, it’s probably like the hoarders who claim they’re collecting all that rusting scrap metal and tin cans as money for their grandchildrens’ inheritance, or those that hoard things to be kept because so-and-so’s kids could use it - but they never give much of anything away.
After retirement, one of my old coworkers went into the professional organizer business (I realize this is total anecdote, she could be wrong, etc). She said that for the vast majority of the hoarding cases on these shows, the “after” shots are completely fabricated. The TV people move stuff outside, film the “happy” success, and then everything goes right back inside. She said the recovery rates are essentially zero, even with counseling. I think that’s bizarre, and I wonder if there isn’t something physically changed in their brains that makes it hard to be “cured” of hoarding that’s separate from depression or PTSD.
There might be…and it’s related to all the cat crap. It’s a parasite that infects the brain with a condition called toxoplasmosis and it’s highly correlated to exposure to cat feces. In Sam Kean’s “The Violinist’s Thumb” he describes the changes in brain chemistry that can be caused by this parasite…especially in the high levels that occur when someone keeps a lot of cats in less than sanitary conditions. One of the symptoms that Kean describes relates to the way the brain perceives the odor of cat urine…instead of the vomit-inducing reek normal people percieve, highly infected folks perceive the smell as neutral or even pleasant.
A little Wikipedia clipping is below.
Studies show the toxoplasmosis parasite may affect behavior and may present as or be a causative or contributory factor in various psychiatric disorders such as depression, anxiety and schizophrenia.[13][14][15] In 11 of 19 scientific studies, T. gondii antibody levels were found to be significantly higher in individuals affected by first-incidence schizophrenia than in unaffected persons. Individuals with schizophrenia are also more likely to report a clinical history of toxoplasmosis than those in the general population.[16] Recent work at the University of Leeds has found the parasite produces an enzyme with tyrosine hydroxylase and phenylalanine hydroxylase activity. This enzyme may contribute to the behavioral changes observed in toxoplasmosis by altering the production of dopamine, a neurotransmitter involved in mood, sociability, attention, motivation and sleep patterns. Schizophrenia has long been linked to dopamine dysregulation.[17] A large serological study in the United States found evidence that Toxoplasma infection was elevated in a subset of young people with bipolar disorder type I who reported both manic and major depression symptoms. [18] Although T. gondii infection is thought to be detrimental, it may have positive effects on some individuals, including individuals who suffer from too fast reuptake of dopamine due to Dopamine Transporter gene DAT1 polymorphism. A research contrary to the mainstream view is for example, T. gondii seems to stop brain deterioration to Alzheimer’s disease