Hoarders

A new program debuted on A&E this week: Hoarders.

Built on the same framework as the network’s popular Intervention program, each episode of Hoarders follows two separate individuals or families who suffer from compulsive hoarding. Like Intervention, which offers its subjects a free trip to rehab, Hoarders drops a cleaning crew on each subject’s doorstop for 48 hours.

Susan has lovingly referred to me as the “Collector of Collections” and my family often kids me about the amount of stuff I have kept over the years, so I thought I’d check out Hoarders and see how I fared against “the big dogs”. I’m sorry (or glad) to say, I don’t hold a candle to them. On the debut episode, the featured family of five eats dinner in their bed every night because there’s no other clean place to sit, and the single lady had piles of rotten pumpkins in her floor and two refrigerators full of expired food. Suddenly. a bunch of plastic tubs full of Star Wars toys out in the garage doesn’t seem so bad …

When it comes to reality television, there are those who vie for the spotlight and there are those who appear on television in exchange for free services. The former doesn’t interest me all that much and, especially after watching Hoarders, the latter seems a little sad. No one with homes like those could possibly enjoy having their psychosis splayed out across the airwaves, and as both groups mentioned financial hardships, it was hard to fully enjoy the program knowing that these people had traded their pride for the cost of a mobile trash bin and two days worth of manual labor. Still, the train wreck was too horrifying to look away.

The program mentioned twice that “the clutter is the symptom; hoarding is the disease.” The way the show is edited, it looks like after meeting with each person for a day, a cleaning crew shows up and throws away all their stuff. Only one of them talked to a psychologist, which is what these people need as bad (if not worse) than a cleaning crew. If all they’re doing is cleaning these people’s houses, they should plan on showing up once a year and bringing the dumpster with them. To a hoarder, an empty house is just a challenge waiting to be filled, literally.

To date, no neighbor has ever called the police about a mess in our yard, no one has ever threatened to take away our children, and no one in my family has ever eaten anything a year past its expiration date. While I’m sure this wasn’t the intent of the program, suddenly I feel much better about my collecting habits. :)