Will’s Rx for Hoarding: Zoloft and Arson

We’ve been watching Hoarders, and frankly, it freaks me out.

The show is about people who desperately accumulate things to fill some gaping hole of want in their hearts. In each episode, we meet two different hoarders and see their hoards; these range from a knee-high silt of dirty laundry to ceiling-high towers of rotten food. Diving into the fray are a psychologist and a personal organizer(!), there to help the hoarder sort and discard as much of the junk as possible, often on a government-imposed deadline: “If we don’t clear the house of dead cats, the state’s gonna take our children away!”

Also on hand to help are family and friends of the hoarder and a convoy of trucks from 1-800-Got-Junk.

Anyway, this team descends into the house, often in hazmat gear, and tries to persuade the hoarder that shit’s gone off the rails. The poor personal organizer is often outclassed right away because hoarding is rarely an issue of disorganization: there’s some industrial-grade crazy to be handled before teaching people how to sort their daily mail. That’s where the psychologist comes in, trying to figure out what neurotic need is being met by living waist-deep in one’s own discarded diapers, asking questions like, “So, how does E. coli fit in with your plans to have your grandchildren over to play?”

Sometimes they’re successful but often not; it takes longer than a weekend to address the underlying issues that compel a person to hoard. So the episodes usually conclude with some minor progress–a cleaner living space, a hoarder agreeing to seek counseling. You tend to get the sense, though, that some of these folks are just waiting for the cameras to leave before hoarding again.

I understand that the show is supposed to be an intervention for the hoarders, but it occurs to me that the psychologists are proceeding in the wrong order. Shouldn’t you have these people come to counseling FIRST? Maybe you should have a few sessions of talk therapy and a month of anxiety medications underway before bringing in the backhoe. Otherwise, cleaning up is only deferring the problem. It’s sad and upsetting to see these people crying on camera because it’s all happening too fast.

(Though I’ll admit I’m of two minds on that: I could imagine that a sudden loss of everything at once might be a good shock treatment, though I can also imagine it might inspire them to hoard all the more against another such disaster.)

The show scares me because I’m the exact opposite of a hoarder, whatever that’s called–an “ejector,” maybe: I throw away things I should probably keep. I’m not sure why I’m so worried about accumulating things, but I’m horrified that I could be one trauma away from slinking into a nest of trash.

Of course, there’s always that vast electronic archive that I keep, which may well be digital hoarding. So it begins…