My wife’s Grandfather bought a second house for his stuff. He wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the people on this show, but he did need a second house for his stuff.
He also had diabetes and ate at least two bowls of ice cream every day(packed with sugar, obviously). Who knows why people do what they do?
Absolutely agree. I think they literally have a perceptual disorder, like anorexics.
I’ve only skimmed through the thread, so this may have already been answered. Is hoarding as widespread in other countries, outside of North America? I seem to recall animal hoarding cases in Canada, and milder cases of stuff hoarding such as Cellphone’s would-be rental property, but I don’t recall as many sensational news stories as there seem to be in the U.S. with houses being condemned and children being seized by CPS. Is it as prevalent in the UK or France? Or is it more common in high-consumer societies? For example, do the countries with the highest obesity rates also have more reports of major hoarding?
For anybody interested, the first season of Hoarders is now on Netflix instant watch. I may be the last person on Earth to notice this, but I was excited when I found it last night.
This show is really frustrating. It’s difficult to maintain a mindset of “These people have a disease, these people have a disease…” when you see something like that woman with glasses whose hoarding took up two houses, both of which the bank was about to foreclose upon, even as she spent hours agonizing over the decision to throw away empty shampoo bottles.
So far the worst for me was the younger woman who lived with her doormat boyfriend, spent most of the day sleeping, and whose mother would sometimes clean up for her. I don’t care what mental issues that woman had; she was absolutely horrid. I was practically shouting at the TV for her (equally frustrating) boyfriend to get the fuck out and never come back.
I’m surprised some of these people don’t have more severe health problems. I’m thinking of the young gay guy with the alcoholic father who refused to dispose of any of the fur his dog shed, ever. When the hoarding specialist or whoever first made her way into the apartment, she nearly passed out from the smell and quality of the air. I’m surprised that poor guy wasn’t coughing up blood on a regular basis.
Then there’s the older couple from whose house the police removed something like forty dead cats, including entire litters of kittens who just died wherever they were born. That’s ghastly enough, but how did the elderly couple even survive in such a toxic environment?
I do find it interesting to see how some of the subjects of the show manage to keep up their appearance, while others just totally give up. The young gay guy, for instance, and the woman with two houses of junk looked normal outside of their disgusting residences. Others (admittedly, often the older ones) clearly stopped paying attention to their appearance decades ago.
Yup.
Like I said, I would be terrible dealing with these kind of folks. The temptation would be way too strong for me to go off into a Sam Kinnison* scream “You live in a f*cking garbage heap! It’s not memories - it’s junk! Throw this crap out and run a vacuum cleaner thru here, you smelly snot!”
And that would not be supportive.
Regards,
Shodan
"NSFW
But boy, oh, boy would it be satisfying!
I’d either do that, or wind up insane. Like, “The Joker” insane.
I have noticed that members of various cleaning crews have reactions along these lines sometimes. In the episode featuring the woman with the two houses, one of the cleaning guys has a hard time talking about the woman’s obsession with a missing fragment of floor tile while maintaining a neutral fascade; you can tell he wants to either crack up or throw his hands up and scream about the absurdity of the situation.
Just a note that this thread has inspired me to clean out my “box room” this week. And, yes, I’m running into some of the horder irrationality, albeit on a smaller scale. I’ve decided that I am keeping my old course evaluations (at least until I teach again and get more relevant feedback) but I’m pitching things I bought cheaply “just in case”, like polished stones from the dollar store. The REAL gray areas are xeroxed articles from Grad school, some of which may be of some use–or not. I’ve already pitched or sorted the vast majority of it–we’re down to the nitty gritty.
Any advice on the southwestern placemats my mom gave me because they matched my chairs? I’ll never use them, but it does seem like a crappy thing to throw them out.
Goodwill?
Yeah, that’s where they’ll end up if I don’t keep them–along with the silk robe an old lover gave me years ago. Fine things in some contexts, but they’re just not…me.
Donate to a charity, put it on Craigslist or your local Freecycle site, or just throw it away - it’s just stuff. I’m not a huge fan of dumping perfectly good things in the garbage, but sometimes it’s the lesser of two evils (the larger evil being paralyzed by not being able to figure out what to do with something you really have no use for).
I have a client who’s like that with shampoo and conditioner bottles.
“But there’s still some in there!”
“Yes, but…do you want to stand there for five minutes while the water gets cold, waiting for half an ounce of conditioner to trickle into your hand?”
“…I can decant all of it into a smaller bottle.”
“Then I’ll do that for you now.”
“No, I have to find the right bottle!”
Whatever. I have to play along with a lot of nonsense if I want to get paid. I keep telling myself, if I don’t suck it up and do what I can (get away with), they’ll dismiss me and have no one, and then they’ll end up like these people. At least I’m keeping a few people away from the brink.
My mother-in-law is a hoarder. On the level with the people on this show, in my opinion. My husband has joked about signing her up, but she doesn’t have a pressing eviction or anything that would make her want to. She’d also be completely unwilling to show her face on TV. My sister-in-law and I spent two weekends cleaning her closets and kitchen about 3-4 years ago. She had refilled them within a few days. It is an incredibly frustrating and heartbreaking disease to deal with. We are all at various degrees of “given up.” My husband mutters about making her clean out and move closer to us so she can see her grandkid more often. But I know it will never happen, short of us having her declared incompetent and coming in with dumpsters.
I watch Hoarders regularly and it actually spurred a good conversation with my husband, who has shades of his mother’s problem. We just moved and I am making an effort to clean out and get rid of stuff as it’s unpacked. He’s showing some reluctance in doing the same. He caught me watching an episode and it prompted a conversation about my worries for him, especially since I know myself well enough to know that if he did start hoarding I would likely ignore/avoid the situation until it was out of control. He agreed to start working with me to get rid of stuff. So I think it can be a useful show in that regard. It hits home to those of us who might be borderline and keeps up on the straight an narrow. And I feel an affinity for the relatives and friends they show. I’ve been there and it really helps to know I’m not alone in dealing with this kind of situation.
They were all available on the A&E website last season. I don’t know if they still are.
For me, that really underlines that this is indeed some kind of disorder; no one without a disorder agonizes over empty shampoo bottles; they’re simply tossed.
As other posters in this thread have said, this show has really caused me to examine the random things I keep around for no discernable reason. After this show, it is very difficult for me to justify keeping anything around by saying “Well, I might need (outdated/useless/broken object) someday…”
Being poor, I live a fairly spartan lifestyle to begin with, but I still catch myself hanging on to stuff that I know will never be of any use for totally irrational reasons. The show has helped me to be like, “Okay, I am never going to need this charger for a phone I owned five years ago, I’m throwing it away,” instead of tossing it in the junk drawer.
I wonder if there’s an upsurge in donations to Goodwill the day after the show airs.
Yeah, what IS it with the shampoo bottles? The friend I mentioned a few times has a bunch of empty ones in her bathroom. She claims she can’t toss them in the recycle barrel until she’s cleaned them out completely. But she never does clean them. I suspect she wants to see if she can get anything for them at the recycling center.
I can sort of weirdly relate to the shampoo bottle thing because of a trait I picked up from my parents. In my house growing up, food containers didn’t get thrown out until they were completely empty. In practice, this led to too many boxes with, like, 3 Froot Loops in them sitting around for ages.
To this day I have a hard time throwing containers out if there’s anything left in them, even if the amount left is so small as to be practically useless.
Of course, at this point I realize that this is silly and simply toss the bottle with a speck of dish soap in it, but I can understand the impulse behind, “I can’t throw this away, it isn’t empty.”
That’s part of the reason I’m fascinated by the show; it’s very much a “There but for the grace of God…” thing for me.
Back when shampoos had twist-off caps, at my house whenever shampoo had just a teeny bit in the bottom, we would fill the bottle with water. It was weaker shampoo, but good for three or four more washes.
I think perhaps some people who would do the same thing cannot get over being stymied by stay-on caps. You know, obsessive types. The ritual of washing is not the same.