The damage mental health problems cause aside, that is a funny observation, Oly.
Capitalism has created a society of rabid consumers. And sometimes it’s not material stuff we feel compelled to cram into our lives.
There’s something tempting about focussing on other people’s problems. As a person who watches TV once in a blue moon I have to admit that I needed to check into “Hoarders” to have a look-see.
But when I was done watching I put it back. Swear I did!
Mmmm… cake.
Hoarding is a problem that is often kept as a deep dark secret – sufferers are very isolated, and often pull other family members, particularly their children, into the secrecy. What the hoarding shows do, in addition to providing entertainment, is to shine a bright spotlight on the problem. I think it is valuable and useful to show both hoarders and non-hoarders that this problem is more common that you might think, and that it is a mental illness. Supposedly the 1-800-JUNK people who are featured in many episodes have had an enormous boom in business because of the show. While that’s to their commercial benefit, it’s also to the benefit of those people who are recognizing the problem and dealing with it because of these shows. And that doesn’t even count the thousands of people who do more cleaning than they ordinarily would because they saw an episode.
Meanwhile, the show from which Hoarders was spun off, Obsessed, has its season premier on June 28.
I find it hard to watch them much since once upon a time I lived with a hoarder (though at the time I thought was more uniquely crazy).
When I first moved to grad school I found a room for rent for $350 a month. Nice big house, swimming pool, near the beach. I was poor so I took it even though I saw what the common areas were like.
Fortunately, she was very clean about her stuff, but it was literally piled high to near the ceiling with paths through it. It was oppressively miserable once I was living there. I would go home, go into my room and not come out until I was leaving.
Three rooms were rented out and the other two guys did the same. I never saw them. Then about four months later a hot plate in one of the other rooms started a fire and I got home just as the FD was mopping up. Essentially they arrived on scene, found they couldn’t move inside the residence and so just sat out front spraying water on things to keep the neighbors safe and watched it burn to the ground.
I went to a hotel that night, returned once to take photos for an insurance claim, and then never went back. I’ve always wondered what happened to her. If it was a forced restart or if she just began accumulating crap anew.
So every time I watch one of the shows on hoarders it is an unpleasant flashback to remembering how my first four months living in Hawaii were miserable.
When I think about this, I realize that I know or have known at least five. Two of them about as severe as the people on this show, one not quite up to that point yet, and the other two kept it confined to just a few rooms instead of filling the house.
This show makes me feel better about myself. I was discussing with my wife how they need to tell the hoarders that they’re only allowed to keep what they can name off the top of their heads. I can tell you everything in my house that I’d want to keep and the rest can be thrown out.
And then burn those houses down.
I know a semi hoarder and he lives (or lived) with an honest-to-god hoarder. When I’ve been out to the house he was renting with his aunt and cousins, the garage was always open because it was too full to close. There was the goat trail to the door at the back of the garage and everything else was old VCRs, PC parts, half-dissassembled LARCs, etc… I never saw the interior but always wanted to. The hoarding was leaking out onto the front porch in the form of ornamental statuary.
I’d be willing to bet some of these people are so OCD they could name damn near everything in their house.
AND tell you why it’s sooooo valuable.
I watch it because it does motivate me to clean–I’m a cluttery person and terrified of this fate. And my in-laws are well down the path, and someday we’re going to have to deal with that.
My oldest friend’s father is a hoarder. I’ve known this family since pre-school. It’s at the point where the upstairs of the house is all his and the rest is for my friend’s mom. I haven’t been to the upstairs part in years but when I was it was awful. One room was completely full of trash such that the door couldn’t even be opened any more. He once bought a case of bbq sauce on sale because it was such a good bargain and he doesn’t even like bbq sauce. They own a small apartment building and can’t rent out two of the apartments because he has started to fill them up with stuff. In fact, a lot of the stuff that he has hoarded is stuff left behind by renters. You just never know when a 1970’s era phone book in Persian will come in handy.
I won’t even watch Hoarders because I know that it will depress me too much. I mentioned that to my friend and he told me that he had watched it a few times. This is an exact quote from him, “those people are amateurs compared to Dad.”
I’d be tempted to steal something from them, just to see if they’d notice.
I used to know a hoarding family I guess. They were actually one of our neighbors. I became friends with her daughter, so I got to see the inside of the house. Both the mom’s and daughter’s bedrooms were piled high with clothing. So much clothing, that it was level with their beds. They also had three dogs, and a couple of cats. The living room area didn’t look THAT bad (relatively I guess). If you had only seen the living room, dining room, backyard, front yard and kitchen, you would have just assumed they were a bit messy. They had animal hairs all over the sofas, beetles and cockroaches in the kitchen because of unwashed dishes but that was about it. Oh, the mom would keep porn videos (in VHS!) laying around.
They were having trouble paying the bills so the bank took over the house. We even broke a few of the windows by throwing small rocks at them. Being a kid is fun 
For a while, the unattended house’s backyard was our “smokeout spot.” That is, until we kind of got caught smoking by one of the potential buyers. That family actually ended up getting the house but they left shortly after. That house went through a few owners the first two or three years but now there’s finally a family that has lived in there for a while.
I just remembered another thing. There are pads of scratch paper that they use to make shopping lists or whatever that are from businesses that haven’t been open in over a generation. The phone numbers are the old kind with the two letters in front like EX3-5499.
I’m fascinated by this stuff. I work in animal rescue and have dealt with animal hoarders. These people really are mentally ill, and unfortunately it hasn’t been until the “sensationalistic” TV shows that people recognize the problem for what it is. Even with that, there are still very few therapists equipped to deal with the psychological aspects of getting these folks to a functional state.
I just moved from an apartment where I had 2 walk-in closets full of crap after living there for 8 years. By the end of 2 weeks of packing and throwing stuff out, I’m pretty sure I filled 4 or 5 dumpsters of stuff out, and still had plenty left to move! I can see how people with the inability to throw things out can go for several years before things start to get out of control enough for others to notice. That means they can go for probably a decade or longer with no therapy whatsoever. Left for that long without any mental health assistance, it must be even that much more difficult to get on the right track.
I can’t imagine what it must be like, seeing how much I accumulated just from being lazy with extra space, for hoarders to let go.
There is a story in Chicago right now, that’s been in the news for over a week, about a senior couple living in their house so full of junk they got trapped in there for THREE WEEKS before someone found them, starving to death, trapped under a pile of junk that had toppled over onto the wife and when the husband went in to help her, he got trapped too!
I had a childhood friend whose home was almost as bad as the TV hoarders. I think it must have been the grandmother of the house who was the hoarder, because after she died they it cleaned it out. They were excited to discover a piano in the living room that they didn’t know they owned.
The food hoarder did not piss me off at all. It is obvious she has a problem. The woman who pissed me off was the one who kept blaming her daughter-- the only one who cared enough about her to keep coming back and trying to help-- raising her brother when he was taken away from that God-awful house.
You know, the one who ‘loved animals’ but had not one but TWO DEAD FUCKING CATS underneath her decades worth of shit. Who then just shrugged when the carcasses where shown to her. The one who couldn’t even say ‘thank you’ when the crew chipped in their own money to buy her a new chair because the one she had disintegrated when they tried to move it.
Ungrateful bitch. I agree with the daughter when she had finally had enough, “She’s just a damn PIG!”
I did feel sorry for the lady with the two years worth of used Depends in her bathroom and kitchen. The one who slept tied to the medical toilet. “I didn’t call anyone for help because I didn’t want to embarrass or burden my family. If I die in the mess I have no one to blame but myself.”
Bolding mine.
I agree that awareness is important and that some people may be improving their lives because they saw the program.
But I do have a problem with this common social trend to sensationalize serious issues and provide them as entertainment. For every person who is enlightened and perhaps more understanding because of the show there must be dozens who are desensitized and amused. It filled a couple of hours they didn’t know any other way to fill.
I wonder if this culture has become so lazy that the only way to inform people is to keep them amused. And yes, I do get that TV is more about commercialism than it is about refining our intellect. I don’t for a moment buy that the producers intended anything other than making money.
While I have a hearty sense of humor and can find something funny in social problems, context is important. And when serious issues are frequently presented as entertainment it’s just tacky to my perspective. And overall I don’t see a great deal of social improvement coming out of it.
What are the number of hours the average viewer watches a week? Is it enriching them in equal measure?
Having said that, I plan to avoid watching any more of the program because I could see it becoming habit-forming. 
Seems like the OP was hinting at that.
Could it be accidental? Must be.
Oh, darned right. A friend–actually, we’re not friends anymore–can do this with her piles of crap: “Oh, I’m keeping those toiletries from that Las Vegas hotel because it reminds me of when I was there, except for that one that my friend so and so gave me and it’s sentimental…I’m keeping all those concert ticket stubs in my wallet so I don’t forget the concerts…I have to keep all those wine bottle corks because they’re worth a lot of money…I have to keep all those condiment packets because I need them and it would be wasteful to throw them out…” and so on.
We don’t get a lot of these basic-cable channels, so I’ve only been able to see Hoarders a couple of times. My dad is a hoarder and, to me, it’s a bit comforting to see that this is a widespread problem and not just him being weird about wanting to keep several decades worth of unread magazines or garbage bags full of empty yogurt containers in his studio apartment.
Is it exploitative? I dunno. Probably. But at least I have some context for his problem. At least he doesn’t have dead animals under all that stuff (at least I hope not), and when he told me a few weeks ago that he “threw out a bunch of stuff” I about lost my mind - I had him repeat it at least three times to make sure I’d heard correctly. I don’t know what happened to make him do that, and he’s still buried under several metric tons of crap, but the fact that he threw out anything was a major, major triumph.
As a ‘pack rat’ having inherited a bit of this tendency on a much milder scale, the show actually helped me identify some warning signs. Like that lady who allowed them to throw stuff away, then went picking through the bags and brought everything back into the house. Part of me knows that feeling a little bit, though I certainly haven’t acted in such an extreme way. Seeing it played out on the screen helps me not only deal with my dad more sympathetically, but also recognize when I’m starting to veer uncomfortably close to that territory myself.
My ex-sister in-law is as bad or worse as any of these TV hoarders.
She lost custody of her daughter because of the state of the house, the food hoarding and the state of her refrigerator was the last straw for her caseworker. She had several cats and no litterboxes.
She couldn’t get access to make necessary repairs because of the trash piled everywhere, so the city condemed the place.
.
She also failed to keep paying a small second mortgage and lost the house. She could’ve easily sold the property for much more than the loan balance ( it’s in a very good neighborhood and the land was worth twice what she owed) but she didn’t and she got foreclosed on and the place was sold.
The new owner was supposed to take possession on June 1 ( haven’t heard a report from home in the past few days) but she made no effort to clean or retrieve any belongings. Her adult son and my brother went over to try to get some stuff out before she lost it all and she called the cops on them.
And she still doesn’t think she has a hoarding problem. However, she thinks she is an alcoholic because she drank beer at parties in high school, she’s 50 now.