Patty, compulsive shopper and hoarder. Husband Dave doesn’t seem to be a hoarder, could be an enabler. Their two young kids were taken out of the house by police and placed with their grandparents; the house has to be cleaned before they can come back. The fridge was stuffed full of food the same way as the house was with stuff, so there might even be filth in this house.
Bill, hoarder. Semi-retired, hoarding stuff for at least 30 years, mostly related to tools and renovation. Lorelei, his partner, tries to cope with the insanity of his stuff. “I’m tired of being lumped in with things…” She has told him to clean up or get out. Teens or early-20s daughter of Bill is living there, hides out in her very clean room.
More disappointing results than previous shows. Instead of “I wonder if they’ll stick with it, I hope they get therapy”, we get cleaning failures.
Patty - turns out she kept 1500 boxes full of stuff! :eek: I can see why the court wasn’t convinced she wouldn’t backslide. I was also shocked at how much it looked like she and her husband had aged, compared to their photos - both of them, especially her husband, had very drawn faces.
Bill - broke down under the pressure of trying to clean and the comments from his partner and daughter. I thought he was being disingenuous when he said that Lorelei tripping on stuff on the stairs and breaking her arm was what spurred him to try this; he may feel that way now, but the injury was 9 months prior and he didn’t even shift what she tripped on. She gave him an ultimatum. Pity it took her heart attack 9 weeks after the show to get him interested in cleaning again.
I haven’t watched the most recent ep yet (will probably watch it later) but I have to admit that I’m shocked to hear that someone lost their kids and still didn’t manage to clean things up. I mean, I can see that obviously this is a mental illness, but still, you would think that the biological imperative to get your children back would override the urge to keep all of your filthy mounds of junk.
While watching last night’s episode, I was incredibly frustrated by Bill’s sense of entitlement. Where does he get the misguided idea that he can render the house unusable, and apartment spaces unrentable, because of his personal need to to gather construction supplies? The worst point for me, though I know it’s just a tiny detail in the big picture, was his habit of rooting through his daughter’s wastebasket for “recyclables”. The thought of this likable girl’s privacy being violated like that made me cringe. I’m really surprised the wife and daughter waited this long to give him an ultimatum.
Patty saddens me more than angers me. She seemed to cling to anything having to do with her children, only to lose them as a result. I do hope we get to see a follow-up about her case.
(And on a lighter note, because I desperately need one after this episode: Did anyone else catch Bill’s therapist using a Dr. Phil zinger? “How’s that working for you?” indeed!)
I havent seen all the other episodes, and only parts of some, but it looks like Bill, and maybe both, set a new record for the sheer volume of stuff hoarded.
Lorelei (the woman who broke her arm) is posting on Facebook that Bill is getting help and slowly making improvements. Nice to see she has recovered from her heart attack.
Internet scuttlebutt is that Patty and her husband divorced, the son went to live with him and Patty and their daughter are living with her parents. All of this is second or third hand so take it for what it’s worth.
It’s funny, the way the show ended I would have given Patty better odds at recovery. Hopefully in time she’ll get better. Lorelei also said the show has been renewed and there are plans to do some follow up episodes.
It almost seems to be setting them all up for failure having the therapist and the dump trucks all showing up at once. It seems like giving them at least a few weeks with the therapist first before they have to face the clean up tasks would be more effective (but would make for a less dramatic program I suppose).
Arguably the show’s biggest success was the formerly homeless man in Seattle who lived in that tiny efficiency apartment. No doubt that was partly due to his efforts and willingness to change but I think it helped that he had such a small place. Cleaning up these huge homes in two or three days seems like a tall order.
Having a perfectly neat home isn’t that important to me either - in fact I know I keep more stuff than I need to - but I’m amazed people like Lorelei and Dave have stuck around in conditions that are near-unlivable and really disgusting.
The mouse shit covering the kitchen counter was just…how do you put up with that? I can actually halfway understand collecting more stuff than you know what to do with, and being disorganized, and winding up with giant piles of stuff. I get that. But cooking your food in an area that is contaminated with piles of mouse shit? And that fridge! Black mold?!
I have (obviously) now watched the whole episode, and I have to say, I think I have the least sympathy for the people in this one than in any of the others I’ve watched. Like I said, I can sort of understand and sympathize with hoarding in general. But when you have a loving wife and child telling you that it’s the junk or them, and you seem to have a pretty good relationship with these people (apart from the junk) and you choose the junk…I don’t get that. And I really, really don’t get Patty, who was under court order to clean the place up or permanently lose custody of her kids, and was still saying, “No, I want to keep this,” “No, this is a keepsake, I want to keep this,” “Make sure not to throw this stuff away,” etc. If I were in that situation, and I think I’ve mentioned previously in this thread that at a prior time in my life, I was pretty close to (if not over) the line of chronic hoarding, I would have told those junk removal guys to come in with steamshovels if necessary, to get that crap out of there ASAP so my kids could come back. No way would I be lovingly reminiscing over a baby backpack that my kids no longer even fit into! I did not understand that person at all.
I guess I don’t really understand the soft approach - especially with the mom. I would have had a picture of her two cute kids in one hand and everytime she hesitated over an item, shoved the picture in her face and said “digusting mouse shit covered trash or your kids WHICH IS IT?” Repeated over and over, as necessary.
Okay, so at Patty and Dave’s house… I kept noticing that she constantly mentioned her daughter… when she was shopping at Target she said something about getting “some things for me and my daughter” and that her daughter’s messy room upset her the most, making a big deal out of one of the workers retrieving a very large picture of her daughter out of the corner for her. The son was barely mentioned except for the obvious pictures of him and at the end saying the son was in temporary custody with Dave.
It’s the “Intervention” approach (not just the show, but the actual thing too.) The family has been doing the “soft method” for years now. One would have thought that a court order telling her to clean up or lose her kids would have been a good enough of a slow start to get the ball rolling, but obviously it wasn’t, so you then move on to the hardball approach.
I have to agree with the posters saying it’s time to let go of the soft approach. There’s a fundamental contradiction between, “things desperately need to be fixed and we have a cleanup crew for two days” and “the hoarder has to check every single item before we throw it out”.
I realize the therapists and organizers are aiming for a long-term, lasting solution, but surely there must come a point at which the patient’s well-being takes a backseat to that of the people around them? To pick one example, why shouldn’t Bill’s wife and daughter just chuck his magazines into an oil drum and burn them? If he’s going to rant and holler about each one, will it really be that much worse to his psyche to throw out the lot of them? Rip the band-aid off already!
I suspect that though this stuff makes for dramatic TV, a screaming mental breakdown/physical attacks might be beyond what they want to show. Considering how freaked-out people get by just seeing something “unapproved” go into the dumpster, forcing severe confrontations would probably get very ugly, very fast.
I think it’s kind of like alcoholism - you can scream at an alcoholic and toss the bottles out, telling them they’re going to lose their kids/house/job/whatever, but if they really don’t want to quit drinking, it won’t happen.
That being said, I think the families need to drop the ultimatum bomb faster. Tough love and all that - especially poor Lorelei. I understand she loves the guy, but he cared more about the stuff and what it did for his emotional “cushion” than he cared about her breaking her arm.
That guy didn’t seem like a hoarder in the same way as the other people they’ve shown so far. He was just lazy and threw all his take-out food garbage on the floor, until he was just living on top of a mound of literal garbage. I don’t remember him having much, if any, emotional attachment to it (besides some papers & bottles.)
Man, what a bummer ending to last night’s show. I thought Patty succeeded pretty well when they showed the transformation of her house, but then to read the coda at the end that she kept 1,500 boxes, didn’t get her kids back and got divorced?
Yes, they seem to want to “let” the hoarders go through every little thing and at least get to say goodbye to it.
Thats pretty darn close to the behavior that got them in trouble in the first place.
Seems to me they need something more like “this is virtually ALL crap”…“you need to get RID OF or never get / keep crap in the first place”…“virtually ALL this crap MUST GO”…"pick the top 5? 3? 1? percent, thats what you can realistically keep.
And where do these people get the money to buy all this crap in the first place? Yeah, if I never even took out the garbage this house would fill up pretty quick, but some off them have an amazing amount of non garbage hoardage.
I think part of it must be that the hoarders have less incentive to agree to do the show. Many of the people on Intervention have basically been caught on tape committing crimes, or have criminal records, and are being offered treatment programs worth thousands of dollars. Part of me wishes they’d get some of the mediators form that show onto Hoarders for some tough love.
