My mother was a hoarder. When she died (in September) I spent a month and a half clearing out her two-bedroom apartment - this was the most stressful period of my life, even with my sister’s help.
I have some hoarding tendencies myself, and am glad that programs like Hoarders exist. My wife keeps our apartment sane. Every couple of months I I give my head a shake and straighten out my office. (My employers tolerate a certain amount of disorder because I am awesome, but in all honestly I would instantly fire anyone who allowed as much crap to accumulate as I do.)
I thank Hoarders and maternal death for the impetus to do these periodic cleansings.
When my mom shuffles off her mortal coil, I told her I wiill hire a bulldozer. She pointed out that there are treasures hidden throughout the stuff. I don’t care. I let go of anything years ago in my mind.
I love watching both these shows, because they encourage me to clean and remind me not to backslide into what I was. On the Squalor ScaleYogSosoth mentioned, I grew up in level 2 (few friends over because of the clutter), and have forced myself down from level 1 (little piles too easy to ignore). In contrast to others I’ve seen, a divorce actually broke my hoarding habit. My ex was rather controlling and kept telling me to throw things out regardless of their financial or sentimental value. I rebelled and insisted that he had no business doing that. The few times I let him bully me into getting rid of things (usually books and craft projects), I resented both the act and him. Then we got divorced. I had to move into a much smaller place, which meant I had to get rid of boxes and boxes of stuff. Something snapped into place in my head, though: Compared to the intense emotions of the divorce (betrayal, rage, sadness), the emotions of parting with things was insignificant. I still have more clutter than I should, but I’ve cut down new purchases to almost nothing. I’ve donated huge bags of clothes and boxes of books to charity. Sometimes it’s hard, and I think far too long about getting rid of something insignificant, but for the most part for me the clutter has become “just stuff”.
Did anyone watch last night’s? It’s the A&E one, Hoarders.
Wow. One dude’s girlfriend died and paramedics could not get to her because of the mess. She was a massive alcoholic and died from a alcohol-related seizure that caused a heart attack. The dude(Norman) seems nice enough and he really did love her.
The lady with the two older sons was pathetic, too.
I just saw an episode where this guy had a room with wall-to-wall beer cans, because he was convinced that they would be worth something, because they were so old. I’m thinking he probably could only do that if there was a depository near by that excepted old cans. (Our neighbor does that – but he doesn’t have a garage full of them, only a recycling bin!)
I don’t think that’s what Cubsfan was saying. Although someone who claims that she doesn’t have time to take care of spiders, but then turns around and justifies her time on here by “weak impulse control…”
What people need to understand is that telling a hoarder or a hoarders family “why not just throw it out?” is akin to telling a heroin addict “why not just quit today?”. If you had spent any time at all with a hoarder the truth would become clear that it is a mental illness, the hoarders emotional wellbeing is tied in with the possessions. Losing a pile of urine soaked phone books is as devastating as the death of a child.
What annoys me about these shows is the focus on cleaning, its totally futile without addressing the terrible mental/emotional illess that is the root of it.
Its like forcing a heroin addict to go into physical withdrawal, pointless because that isn’t the root of the issue.
There are people on these shows I am not sure are hoarders, they show 0 emotional attachment to their hoard. On the other side is the young man who believed throwing out his dog’s shedded hair showed lack of love and would hasten the dog’s death, classic hoarder.
If you watch you’ll notice the onset of hoarding is usually caused by extreme loss, the one hoarder I knew personally had a teenage son shoot himself in the head in front of her after they had an argument. It started her hoarding and from what family had said broken her mentally.
I concur with grude: a true hoarder has an emotional attachment to the massive amount of STUFF. You can point out the bugs, the rats, the urine-soaked items, and the hoarder will AGREE those things are hazardous. But they can’t allow others to come in and clear out the nastiness, out of fear that something good MIGHT be thrown away. They are convinced they will need some item, some day.
If you were to give a hoarder a week’s vacation to Disney World and then clear out the house while the person was gone, the hoarder would have a mental breakdown upon returning. The relationship between the hoarder and the one who “tricked” him or her would turn to hatred. And then the hoarder would go out of his way to fill up the house again with stuff.
I’m surprised on the A&E show that ONLY therapy is offered. Hoarding is a plethora of mental disorders, and I would think that some type of antidepressant would be necessary, and perhaps even a short term medication to control the panic symptoms.
~VOW
I’m not anywhere close to a hoarder, but I do find myself hanging onto things (like T-shirts or old computer game boxes) that have some kind of memorable value, and I find this is the perfect way to convince myself to toss the items. It works really well, and if I really do want to take a stroll down memory lane it’s easier to browse photos than dig up some dusty boxes.
It’s not a solution for anyone with serious mental illness, but I’d recommend it for anyone with hoarding “tendencies”.
That was a mesmerizing episode. Watching the first guy swing along the stairway railings like a monkey amidst all the junk looked kind of fun (at least to my inner ten-year-old). It was fascinating to see the dresser plugging the stairwell, where the EMTs had thrown it in their efforts to carve a path.
It was hard, though, not to think of Jeff on Intervention saying, “we’re not going to love you to death.” The girlfriend wasn’t buying her alcohol herself.
The other woman’s family really bugged me. It was grating to hear everyone keep calling her fortysomething, dependent sons “boys.”
I’ve never seen Intervention, but it is a shame they didn’t get his girlfriend on there. Intervention just seems too depressing to me.
Yeah, what was up with those guys? Why did they live at home with Mom when they are clearly 45+ years old? Did they explain that? I only heard that one lived with a gf for awhile and moved back in after a break up. Don’t they have…jobs?
Their situation was not explained. To my untrained eye, one of them looked maybe just a little developmentally delayed, and the other one looked like a moocher. But they’ve probably lived their whole lives in a toxic, stunted emotional environment, so I feel a little bit sorry for them too.
What amazes me is the consistency of detail in the manifestation - it’s like there’s a switch inside the human brain that, once thrown, makes a person start collecting and stacking up specific kinds of items in a specific way, and engenders a desire to imprison large numbers of animals.
Did anyone get the feeling that Spalding Gray in Phila. was holding his alkie girlfriend hostage in his hoard, a la *What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? *
And that slug-like woman with her two “boys,” Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum? I think the sister has to realize that the Crazy Ship has sailed.
I miss Dr. Tonya Hoarding, but love the new addition, the aggressive Dr. Green-Eyeshadow.
A couple of things I’ve picked up from watching Hoarders:
The reaction to loss is devastating to these people. None of them, however, realize just how devastating it is because they’ve been living it 24/7 for years upon years. (As a side note, I’d like to see how many of them are adoptees – one of my pet theories is that adoption somehow ties into it because every single adoptee I’ve known has had packrat tendencies, even if they were adopted as an infant).
The fact that they cannot understand how their hoarding issue affects others. I’ve known a couple of people who were literally thrown out of their families’ homes because the families were afraid they’d start hoarding in earnest. The fact that these would-be hoarders gave willingly gave up a roof over their heads in favor of their “stuff” – I’m still speechless about it.
Before the Spalding Gray (heh)/ mealy-mouthed Mom episode they showed what I guess was a rerun. A woman with two teenaged children lived in roach infested squalor. The husband moved out and"didn’t have custody of the children". The woman was an insulin dependent diabetic with fibromyalgia. That family did not seem to have any hoarders in it, just a really lazy mother and children who did not know how to clean. And once a house gets that filled with garbage, not even the best intentioned, most well-meaning and ultra-neat teen will be able to get it clean. And these kids were NOT that.
Anyway, this woman did not have any emotional attachment to her garbage at all. According to her, the mess was her children’s fault and she was too ill to contemplate cleaning. So she tossed her used sanitary napkins in the floor of the bathroom and her insulin needles beside her “throne” in the livingroom. Until she had 8 foot piles of the stuff.
A hazmat team had to be called in. The counselor tried to make her see that she couldn’t shove the responsibility of the house on her children. Her response was to say that she felt ill and was going to throw up so she needed to lay down. The hazmat crew cleaned around her while she pretended to sleep.
What got me was that the mom didn’t need a therapist for her “hoarding” problem. The whole household needed a home-making class or 10. They all were aware of the mess and especially the roaches, but they really didn’t acknowledge it. The daughter, who did all of the cooking while squashing roaches, said she just ignored the stuff that could kill her and walked around barefoot in knee-deep filth with hidden syringes in it.
That’s gotta be a different illness than hoarding, no?
My WAG is that becomes part of the aftercare portion. Antidepressants take a while to kick in, and for any meds, you’d need a MD to evaluate the person’s health condition first.
Oh, that was on the TLC show, not the A&E one, and the first time I have had to turn away from the set in horror. I am guessing severe depression and some other kind of mental illness on the part of the mother, and the poor kids were just raised feral and don’t know anything different. I was wondering what was the story on Daddy Chinbeard, their father–how bad does *he *have to be that the *Mom *got custody?!
Roaches and spiders and maxi-pads . . . *urgh *. . .
I wonder the same thing. I can sort of understand hoarding. I think most people feel some level of compulsion in their lives; when I walk by bushes, I feel a strong urge to touch them and feel the leaves or needles on my fingertips. I don’t know why, I just feel compelled to do it.
But the people who let filthy, unsanitary conditions develop make no sense to me. That has to be a different mental illness, or some kind of severe apathy (the same type you see in hillbillies with broken down cars on their front lawn, only worse). Their explanations always sound like excuse-making to me, like they were just lazy and let the filth accumulate to a level that made it too overwhelming to contemplate cleaning.