Apparently, there is an underlying biological cause for hoarding. Both psychotherapy, and especially, taking the antidepressant paroxetine appears to help.
The Chicago Tribune has been running a series of articles on hoarders after a couple of recent deaths where the bodies of hoarders were found amongst piles of things in their homes. It’s not an automatic judgement of non compos mentis/mentally incompetent here. If the person is found otherwise sane and able to understand the proceedings, I think the worst that the government can do is force a cleanup for health code reasons, much like you see happening in some of these cases. I suspect a “cleaner” hoarder (no human waste, etc.) might well get away with staying cluttered for longer.
Here’s the latest in the series, which addresses the difficulty involved when someone doesn’t want to be helped.
Yes! What was up with that? Poor kitties.
I am certain that if social workers approached my in-laws, both of them would insist that there is not a problem. This, in spite of the fact that, when we had breakfast with them on Monday morning, my FIL spent at least 15 minutes interrogating my husband on the whereabouts of an old microwave they left in a house that we’re preparing for sale! Of course, he has at least five other old microwaves, but that’s not the point. He wants that one. :smack:
There’s no problem, though. They can quit hoarding anytime they want to. 
Actually, neither of them would even cop to being hoarders. They would both go straight to justifying why they ‘collect’ the stuff they do!
I can see that being the case for the elderly. In Elendil’s tragic link there was a quote:
"Michelle Carro, an assistant psychology professor at the University of Nevada, told The Las Vegas Review Journal that hoarding happens when people find it impossible to make decisions, organize themselves or focus on immediate tasks.
That would fit a lot of elderly people, particularly those who’ve lost a spouse, or are starting to get a little dotty.
When my dad died, going through his stuff was weird. We threw out or donated most of it, but it took a stupidly long time, because it was his stuff. Know what I mean? You wouldn’t throw out your co-worker’s stuff without asking first, right? So disposing of items that belonged to another person was tough because it felt like we were throwing things out without permission. It’s not like he was coming back, but it still felt like we were messing with stuff that didn’t belong to us.
I know that if my wife died I’d be a mess. “I can’t get rid of that! It’s hers!”
I know! When that daughter said the day they took away her cats was the day they took away her smile I wanted to barf.
Umm…a metal cage with 6-8 inches of feces, under black plastic and outside in the front yard is a mighty strange place to keep “your smile.” That was infuriating and I don’t even like cats.
I have sympathy for the people on this show unless there are children or animals involved. There was one episode where the family was actually living in a tent in the yard because the father had filled the entire house, and they were prompted to action not only by the involvement of Child Protective Services, but by the coming winter (!).
What I do not understand in any way are the spouses who tolerate the threat to their kids by the other parent’s hoarding. Often there is mental illness on the part of both parents, but sometimes it’s just plain codependency and simply maddening.
I’ve been standing back from the thread to see if Sir Arthur would get a mention. Until they shoed the fridge cleaning I thought we were seeing the show’s first example of what **ferret herder **called “cleaner hoarders”. If you didn’t see the show the home was stuffed to the gills with objects. It wouldn’t be right to call it orderly, but there weren’t mounds of trash or clothing, or any boxes. The man profiled readily admitted to loving anything pretty. He had tons of dolls, and crystal, and had twinkly christmas lights strung in among the items.
He really broke my heart because I can only assume that he based his estimate of the value of the items on the prices he paid. I hope he had been able to make some more progress.
The family of four baffled me. The kids - I mean nearly middle aged offspring both still living at home kind of freaked me out. The daughter especially has the air of soemone who never grew up. And apparently it had never been expected of her to grow up.
I joke that I watch Hoarders to feel better about myself as a housekeeper. It’s a little more complex than that. I do attach too much sentiment to things. If I lived alone I could see myself letting it get further out of control than it does. There have been a couple events in my life where I lost almost everything, so anything I owned before either of those gets kept. I also have a very hard time letting go of anything that was a gift. Intellectually I understand that getting rid of the item is not the same as getting rid of the giver.
If it’s the episode I’m thinking of, it’s also that the house was completely infested with bedbugs, which is what drove them outside to begin with. The father thought he could starve the bedbugs out, because the house was so full that an exterminator couldn’t come in to treat the house. He didn’t realize those little fuckers can live as long as 2 years on a single bite.
Yeah, that family really gave off creepy vibes. I don’t mean anything incestual, I mean emotionally. That father snapped and growled like a badger at the thought of any “outsiders” telling his family what to do, regardless of the condition the family was in. I don’t think it would even occur to the offspring to oppose him, or even have an opinion of their own. Of course, it’s hard to tell from a TV show.
Another weird moment from that bunch was the father saying that one day they got tired of picking things up. So they didn’t. It sounded like there was an argument over who would clean that never got settled.
It reminded me of a story I heard once about two elderly men who were roommates. They got into an argument and stopped speaking to each other. One day, the police came in to investigate a complaint about a suspicious smell. They found one of the men lying dead and decomposing into liquid on the kitchen floor. The police asked the other man about what happened, and the man insisted that his roommate was just being stubborn about not talking to him.
People are stranger than the Addams Family ever was.
Yeah that part was weird. Did they actually *keep *the cats there, or did they just hide them under the tarps that one day because they knew the inspectors were coming and didn’t want them to be found? I don’t understand how they could have been given the cats back if they actually kept them day to day in cages outside under black plastic tarps. Wouldn’t the heat from that have practically killed the cats? Seems like a pretty clear cut case of animal cruelty to me.
Yes. It’s my understanding that that was part of why he was facing eviction, which is what lead to him getting on the show. (He always left the bathroom in our restaurant immaculate, for what that’s worth.)
I know the son in real life. No idea he was on this show at all.
You think he’s a slob? Even though they showed him in Seattle in a clean apartment and taking care of pet.
So… basically because he’s fat he’s a slob too?
Whatever.
Yeah, I don’t know the son in real life, but we are friends on Facebook. And he seems like a really cool guy. Just because someone is overweight and not cleanly shaven doesn’t make them a slob. His apartment was tidy from what we could see on the show.
That family of four was a bunch of supercreeps. And when the father made that remark about “Why don’t you just shoot us?!”, I wanted to smack him into reality. What a drama king. It’s clear he rules the roost and what he says goes, despite the fact that he has allowed his home to rot and fall apart around his ears. What a major case of denial.
The mother wasn’t any better when she ordered the therapist out because he was asking what she deemed to be “stupid questions”. Oh sorry lady, I guess I am a total moron for wanting to know why you have 10 years of garbage piled beside your Lazy Boy. She just didn’t want to face up to her mess.
Also, I don’t completely get why all of these hoarder houses have no plumbing and all the sinks are stopped up. Every house they show has sinks overflowing with nasty water, leaking pipes or no pipes at all, backed up toilets, etc…Is it just due to lack of maintenance? I don’t see how clutter makes your toilet not work. Are they flushing junk down the loo and cramming garbage down the sink drain? I mean, I clean my house, but I don’t do damn thing to my pipes and they have been fine for years.
My WAG is probably in some cases people start doing stupid/neglectful stuff that ends up clogging pipes - not using a drain ‘strainer’ to keep hair/pet fur/whatever from going down the drain, letting inappropriate things go down the drain like cooking fats or coffee grounds, etc. And if you’re unfortunate enough to merely have poor plumbing but you’re a hoarder, you don’t want to let maintenance people in.
Upthread, someone linked the thread I started a few years ago, “Ask the Adult Child of a Hoarder/Clutterer.” In it I mention that the sink in the only bathroom of my childhood home was broken for over a decade. If you can’t clean up the remainders of a meal, you certainly can’t organize yourself to make basic repairs or arrange for someone else to do so.
Thanks for the last two responses, and yeah, I guess it makes sense that poor cleaning habits and lack of basic care leads to all the plumbing breakdown. It’s still just pretty hard for me to fathom, though.
I saw that episode, and while the son was a fat guy, he also seemed like a normal, more-or-less well adjusted human being. I assume that’s what he was referring to when he said “someone like me.”
Though you’re right that the woman did say thank you for the chair. With prodding, and kinda half-heartedly it seemed, but I’d be willing to chalk that up to nervousness and just being generally socially awkward.
well when he knew he was going to be on tv you’d think he might think about shaving and wearing something decent. he looked slovenly is all i’m saying. plus he seemed stone cold when it came to his mom, just like the sister. someone needs to teach them how to deal with someone with a mental illness. the answer is not to yell at them and/or ignore them.