Hoarders (and other fun documentary TV shows)

[sparklemilhouse]

At the end, they were trying to get adult protective services to contact them about her, or something. But at the end, the little update said that they hadn't worked with her yet. That episode was from 2, 3 years ago, and I'm sure she's still in that house :/

 

[A-Stump]

Have you ever noticed that Hoarders has gotten progressively mean spirited as it continued? It wasn't that bad in the beginning but then they just started to say some really mean shit in front of the people and just focus on the 'EWW GROSS!' aspect. The other hoarding show doesn't do that and seems more interested in helping them rather than making a circus out of their self imposed misery.

 

[sparklemilhouse]

Or maybe just the cases got more extreme as time went by, some of those people were fucking redic near the end.

I found another ep on my DVR where the lady's adult son was living with her, he slipped on one of her magazines down the stairs and wrecked his back for life--she don't care.

 

[Da Pickle Monsta]

I occasionally go to the A&E website and watch Hoarders episode from there since they got taken down from Netflix. The episode I was watching yesterday featured a woman who kicked her daughter out of the house at the age of 17 because she threw away plastic coat hangers.

Some hoarders are sympathetic, but others really do deserve their squalor.

 

[telegramsamo]

Anyone else watch Fatal Attractions?

 

[sparklemilhouse]

HOARDERS IS COMING BACK YOU GUYS. June 2nd, lifetime channel.

 

[Mogambo]

Have you ever noticed that Hoarders has gotten progressively mean spirited as it continued?

Have you considered that some hoarders are just horrible people in general, with no concept of even basic standards of hygiene or safety? I think eventually, after working with so many over the years, and seeing them revert back to their old ways or even reject therapy outright, you'd probably get a little callous towards them too. I think its part of the cycle. I get the feeling most hoarders are genuinely unhappy people, and there are times where you just want to slap them and tell them "no, you're doing it wrong." And I'm only exaggerating slightly when I say that.

In case you haven't seen one of my previous posts about Snorlax and her hoarding, my mom was a hoarder. Oh, she didn't start out that way. When I was younger, she was almost obsessive about cleaning. Granted, there were signs but nothing like you'd see on the shows. But sometime after I went away to college she became hoarder. Over a relatively short period of time, she accumulated 20+ cats. I mean, I love cats, but these ones just kind of went feral, pissing, vomitting and even defecating all over the place, scratching up furniture, and eating anything that wasn't nailed down. In fact, I know she was undefeeding them, because as you can imagine, it costs a lot to feed 20+ cats. She would wake up at five in the morning to feed them, because she somehow got it in her head to cook for them and had a whole ritual that just got progressively longer as it went on.

As if this weren't enough, she also accumulated a bunch of other crap... most of which was either stored in plastic bins or covered in cat urine and sick. Or both. I honestly don't know where she was getting all of it, or why. Most of it was clothing (especially baby clothing, which is even weirder since neither me nor my siblings had kids, and my only cousin who did at the time lived roughly 1,700 miles away!), but also some VHS and CDs, cookie jars, lots of holiday decorations. Stuff she never used. I know a lot of it came from dollar stores. I don't know how much she would have gotten from thrift shops like Goodwill or the like, but I do know she bought a couple lamps and pieces of furniture from those places. Hell.. she also accumulated a lot of old furniture my grandparents wanted to throw out, along with stuff from when my one aunt passed away (again, stuff she had no use for, like maps, board games, suitcases, a treadmill, yarn and knitting supplies).

Anyway, it got to the point where she filled up the entire basement, garage and several rooms. And aside from the cat fluids (and dust from litterboxes) everywhere, she didn't have a working stove or washing machine, and took out her water softener for some reason, giving the tap water a nice brown colour. She allowed the wall paper to turn brown and start peeling off (which wasn't helped any by the fact that she sometimes picked at it) and had holes in some of the walls. Also some of the electricity started going out, so some rooms had no light and the downstairs TV didn't work. One year, the heat actually went out until my one brother went down to help repair it. That's how bad things get in a hoarder house. She was surrounded by filth and throwing money away. We didn't know where or what on. And when you asked her things, she would get evasive and/or angry at you.

Now I certainly don't hate my family, but that sort of behaviour is clearly unhealthy and it puts a lot of stress on you. It really strains your relationship. Just imagine how bad it is working with those sorts of people when you aren't related to them. Hoarding is clearly a mental disease, or more likely a conflux of them. I think most hoarders are unhappy people. I suspect there's a strong element of depression. As my mother became a worse hoarder, she became much, much more paranoid and introverted. She stopped having interests, instead becoming consumed by her collecting of crap. And I mean crap because it didn't have much meaning to anyone, her included. It was like she just picked generic, random things to fill a void. She also stopped leaving the house, got paranoid about letting anyone into the house (whether friends, repairmen, even deliverymen!) and would turn off the lights if she saw people outside... because "they might look in the house."

I know this is all anecdotal, but later in life I would work with a woman who was also a hoarder, and she was very similar in many ways. Her work station was full of crap, she'd have receipts and print outs from over a decade ago along with used batteries and expired food stuffs, and most importantly she was hostile towards customers (especially blacks and young people, often telling them they couldn't use the restroom; this despite management telling her she couldn't forbid them from using our facilities). She also had a habit of hiding stuff because she didn't feel some customers were worthy of certain products (again, something management had warned her not to do). Now she was never openly hostile towards me, but she was... very high strung and demanding, and needless to say didn't have many friends at work. When I found out that her house was basically a hoarder house from one of my co-workers, I was not surprised at all.

Anyway, sorry to sperg out there, but having experienced hoarders IRL, I can understand why people would develop that attitude. And I don't think it's A-Loggy at all.

IThe episode I was watching yesterday featured a woman who kicked her daughter out of the house at the age of 17 because she threw away plastic coat hangers

At one point, my mother got into a fight with my brother for throwing away an expired $10 coupon, one that I'm sure she had no intention of using in the first place. After that, whenever we cleaned (or tried to clean) her place, we would burn things or throw it away somewhere else. Yes, she was actually GOING THROUGH garbage to make sure people weren't throwing away anything "valuable." *rolls eyes*

Some hoarders are sympathetic, but others really do deserve their squalor.

This. It's self-inflicted squalor. That's the thing that always gets me.

 

[hm yeah]

OCD, OCD, and more OCD

Hoarding is a big part of OCD, apparently. These two women you wrote of have particularly bad cases.

 

[A-Stump]

Hoarders is a program intended for entertainment, rather than a documentary approach. Keep that in mind as you read the rest of this.

When you have a program intended for entertainment, you have to have something which will keep people watching. In the case of Hoarders, it's shock value mixed in with dehumanization. They like to have a wrapping of feel good 'we're helping people' but in reality it's all about shaming people on television. What were the adverts? Rotten food, wrecked homes, declarations of absolute squalor and abnormality. What do you hear most, when people mention the program? It's not the people or the lives that have been changed, it's the cat skeletons under piles of feces or bathrooms filled with literal shit.

Do you think people like that will improve from being shamed in a carnival-esque freakshow? Let me offer a bit of an anecdote myself.

My step brother used to piss the bed a lot as a kid. It's not like he meant to, and you could tell he was incredibly ashamed about it. My father went out of his way to shame him. He'd make him go to every member of the house and tell them what'd he done, would make him stand outside beside his piss stained sheets, would constantly humiliate and debase him every time it happened. The thing is, my dad, I'm sure, thought he was doing a great thing. My step brother grew up to be a very fucked up and emotionally distraught person and improved but I think all of that sideshow, sneering level of shame really knocked hos marbles loose something awful.

So yeah, I actually like Hoarders. It's very entertaining. It appeals to that nasty, mocking part of me but that's the thing, it is a depraved form of entertainment.

 

[hm yeah]

Hoarders is a program intended for entertainment, rather than a documentary approach. [...] it is a depraved form of entertainment.

i call this genre of shows from jerry springer to dr phil to hoarders and so, "freakshows". i've come to just shamelessly enjoy it for what it is, no guilt anymore. we all gawk at freakshows. if it's weird, we'll stare at it. we're human.

 

[Chikinballs]

Hoarders is a program intended for entertainment, rather than a documentary approach. Keep that in mind as you read the rest of this.

When you have a program intended for entertainment, you have to have something which will keep people watching. In the case of Hoarders, it's shock value mixed in with dehumanization. They like to have a wrapping of feel good 'we're helping people' but in reality it's all about shaming people on television. What were the adverts? Rotten food, wrecked homes, declarations of absolute squalor and abnormality. What do you hear most, when people mention the program? It's not the people or the lives that have been changed, it's the cat skeletons under piles of feces or bathrooms filled with literal shit.

Do you think people like that will improve from being shamed in a carnival-esque freakshow? Let me offer a bit of an anecdote myself.

My step brother used to piss the bed a lot as a kid. It's not like he meant to, and you could tell he was incredibly ashamed about it. My father went out of his way to shame him. He'd make him go to every member of the house and tell them what'd he done, would make him stand outside beside his piss stained sheets, would constantly humiliate and debase him every time it happened. The thing is, my dad, I'm sure, thought he was doing a great thing. My step brother grew up to be a very fucked up and emotionally distraught person and improved but I think all of that sideshow, sneering level of shame really knocked hos marbles loose something awful.

So yeah, I actually like Hoarders. It's very entertaining. It appeals to that nasty, mocking part of me but that's the thing, it is a depraved form of entertainment.

at least the folks on tv signed up for it though.

 

[Mogambo]

i call this genre of shows from jerry springer to dr phil to hoarders and so, "freakshows". i've come to just shamelessly enjoy it for what it is, no guilt anymore. we all gawk at freakshows. if it's weird, we'll stare at it. we're human.

Its also kind of "poverty porn," albeit focused on first world people (often overweight, middle aged white women) living in third world conditions. Maybe that makes it more socially acceptable. We feel we can laugh at the spectacle because they are often people who put themselves into that situation, and they aren't dying of preventable diseases or lack of clean water. I don't know. I do think there is a cultural aspect, both to hoarding and the enjoyment of TV shows about hoarders, but I'm not sure I have enough data to actually extrapolate what that would be.

 

[Karellen]

Hoarders cane back this past week. There are 6 two hour episodes. This past Tuesday was about a couple who had 160 tons of garbage, thought the city were nazis for making them clean up and were upset that Donald Trump didn’t respond to their tweets about their “harassment”.

 

[Jozef]

I'm fascinated by this show. Does anybody remember the episode where the lady's toilet stopped working so she kept pooping in it, and her toilet had a huge pyramid of shit about a foot higher than the seat?
Episodes like that are pretty gross but entertaining, but the episodes I have a hard time watching are the ones with animal hoarders. There was this one nasty beast of a "woman" and one of her sons, who had dozens and dozens of cats and dogs, and their house was so disgusting the therapist wouldn't even go inside; apparently you could smell it without even getting close to the house. Imagine what those "people" smelled like?! She had cats in cages stacked on top of each other, and they had things like eye infections, and when the vet asked her why she didn't do anything about it, the woman said "I didn't notice because the cage was on the bottom".
At the end of the episode, they told her that in her state she can legally keep 10 pets or less. She joyfully said "Oh I'll keep 10 then!" and her enabler of a son was reassuring her, saying "You can take care of them!", everyone else was frustrated that she chose to keep that many, saying "If it was 15, she would have kept 15."
People who do this should be charged with animal cruelty. They don't usually get charged, instead they're monitored and will be charged if it happens again. That's like saying "Oh he knocked over a 7-Eleven, but we'll monitor him in case he does it again."

Also, there's a clip of Opie and Anthony with Matt Paxton as a guest. Matt is a really cool guy and he talks about a lot of "behind the scenes" things that you never see on the show...

Opie and Anthony - Matt Paxton from Hoarders in Studio (03/23/2012)

Matt Paxton from Hoarders is in studio to talk about the new season of Hoarders, as well as his experiences with hoarders.

www.youtube.com

 

[Karellen]

I think that was the Stacey and Roi episode. Stacey hoarded animals, and she had killed several of them by indiscriminately laying rat poison all over the house. She also had litter boxes on the oven. Roi on the other hand was messy, but he had actually gone to jail because he was messy, but Stacey got nothing for the cruelty she imposed on those poor animals.

The queen of hoarding would probably have to be Shanna aka the poop lady

 

[GentlemanFaggot]

I'm fascinated by this show. Does anybody remember the episode where the lady's toilet stopped working so she kept pooping in it, and her toilet had a huge pyramid of shit about a foot higher than the seat?
Episodes like that are pretty gross but entertaining, but the episodes I have a hard time watching are the ones with animal hoarders. There was this one nasty beast of a "woman" and one of her sons, who had dozens and dozens of cats and dogs, and their house was so disgusting the therapist wouldn't even go inside; apparently you could smell it without even getting close to the house. Imagine what those "people" smelled like?! She had cats in cages stacked on top of each other, and they had things like eye infections, and when the vet asked her why she didn't do anything about it, the woman said "I didn't notice because the cage was on the bottom".
At the end of the episode, they told her that in her state she can legally keep 10 pets or less. She joyfully said "Oh I'll keep 10 then!" and her enabler of a son was reassuring her, saying "You can take care of them!", everyone else was frustrated that she chose to keep that many, saying "If it was 15, she would have kept 15."
People who do this should be charged with animal cruelty. They don't usually get charged, instead they're monitored and will be charged if it happens again. That's like saying "Oh he knocked over a 7-Eleven, but we'll monitor him in case he does it again."

Also, there's a clip of Opie and Anthony with Matt Paxton as a guest. Matt is a really cool guy and he talks about a lot of "behind the scenes" things that you never see on the show...

Opie and Anthony - Matt Paxton from Hoarders in Studio (03/23/2012)

Matt Paxton from Hoarders is in studio to talk about the new season of Hoarders, as well as his experiences with hoarders.

www.youtube.com

See, this is why I read the summary of Hoarders episodes before watching an episode, because I can't stand seeing shit like that.

At least with 600 Lb Life, there's no animal abuse....

Though I'm glad I watched that one with the rat guy. Teared up a lot though, but it was good TV and he seemed like a really sweet guy who, despite everything, wanted the rats to be taken care of more than anything.

 

[John Titor]

I think that was the Stacey and Roi episode. Stacey hoarded animals, and she had killed several of them by indiscriminately laying rat poison all over the house. She also had litter boxes on the oven. Roi on the other hand was messy, but he had actually gone to jail because he was messy, but Stacey got nothing for the cruelty she imposed on those poor animals.

The queen of hoarding would probably have to be Shanna aka the poop lady

There is something really unsettling about her face like she has the Innsmouth look.

 

[GentlemanFaggot]

There is something really unsettling about her face like she has the Innsmouth look.

Christ, she was something else. The part where she talked about how she was gonna eat the poop salad because, "Well, it's just like when someone goes into rehab, they have one night where they go wild before it!" was just insane!

Figures she was one of the few ones where they actually called social services and declared she was unfit to live by herself.

 

[Francis E. Dec Esc.]

Christ, she was something else. The part where she talked about how she was gonna eat the poop salad because, "Well, it's just like when someone goes into rehab, they have one night where they go wild before it!" was just insane!

Figures she was one of the few ones where they actually called social services and declared she was unfit to live by herself.

They had that other rətarded lady in Maryland who was incontinent, so instead of buying adult diapers she just put layer after layer of newspaper on her bed.

The only episode I could never get through was that guy who adopted the two low-functioning autistic kids who kept ripping chunks of flesh out of his arms with their teeth.

 

[Stephanie Bustcakes]

"I've been eating poop for twelve years." Needs to be in random.txt