Do we actually believe hoarding is an illness?
louise1966
Posts: 4,012 Forum Member
✭✭✭
I, for one, am not convinced. Having just watched Britain's Biggest Hoarders on iplayer, and seen the american version, Hoarders, these people seem to be filthy and innately untidy and unhygienic individuals, content living in their own muck. When it starts to have a negative impact upon one's life, one ought to recognise there is a problem. We need to declutter our boxroom as we use it to store things we have no room for anywhere else. But we are certainly not hoarders. These people always find an excuse for their hoarding: their childhood, something which happened to them in the past, etc. We all have/have had problems, but do not choose to live among a mass of filth and excrement. I watched this programme because there was nothing else on, but I definitely don't think this topic shoud even be given airtime. They are portrayed as victims which they are not; they opt to live in this environment. Constable David Rathband is a genuine victim and, to categorise these muck middens as such, is disrespectful to him.
0
Comments
These so called hoarders were just lazy people who just don't pick their papers up and put them in the bin.
Ok the women was probably a real hoarder but the dude with the papers wasn't as that was just a lazy ass who never binned his papers and letters after reading them.
As for whether hoarding, or any other idiosyncrasy is an "illness," if someone can make some money treating those who have it, it will be classed as that.
I've moved house a few times in the last few years, and each time I've chucked out stuff which I've thought I wouldn't need again, or sometimes chucked out stuff accidentally.
Then a few weeks/months later I've searched for it, only to find it's gone forever.
At which point I have to buy another one, or, if that's not possible, shrug my shoulders and accept I'll have to do without it.
Either way, it's not a major tragedy.
Hoarders seem to think that they won't be able to exist without the mountains of rubbish they accumulate, they make family and neighbours' lives a misery, yet everyone tiptoes round them because they get upset if they have to part with a load of mouldy newspapers.
I can't understand why the spouses or adult children of these people aren't a bit more bracing with them and just told them the stuff was going. I'm sure mine would be, if I got even a fraction as bad as the people I've seen on TV recently!
I daresay this post makes me seem unsympathetic, but I do think there's a lot of self indulgence masquerading as illness these days, and some people are encouraging this state of affairs because they make money out of it.
........
You think our capitalist society is to blame for people who feel compelled to hoard teetering piles of old newspapers, rusty tin cans and takeaway cartons?
william morris: keep bothing in your house which is not either beautiful or practical
it wasnt it was just junk but he didnt see it that way
a bit like a anorexic thinks theyre fat when theyre 5 stone
its a mental illness
What a ridiculous thing to say. These are two completely different situations that just don't compare. Why not take it one further and say neither hoarders nor David Rathband are true, genuine victims in comparison to starving children in Africa?
Unless you genuinely think you're only allowed a monopoly on suffering if you've been shot in the face?
I don't particularly understand hoarders, and find it difficult to imagine how they get into their situation. Similarly, I don't fully understand the steps that lead people to self-harm, or starve themselves, or lose their fortune gambling, or smoke until they're 85.
However, just because I can't sympathise, doesn't mean I don't empathise. IMO, you'd do well to remember the difference between the two, and stop judging everyone else by your own clearly utopian standards.
It's very annoying to those who can't understand the desire to hoard. I remember a documentary on an old man (Mr Trebus, I think he was called) years ago who turned out to have been a victim of the Nazis, possibly in a concentration camp, in Poland. His loss and trauma caused him to hoard, or so the theory went. Poor old fella went out collecting rubbish and brought it home. His house was full of carrier bags to ceiling height. It was heartbreaking - he just couldn't see the need to change, even though he lived in squalor.
It's also an insult to normal hoarders.
I'm a hoarder - I always think things will come in handy one day, and they often do!
That doesn't mean I have to tunnel through piles of my own feg to get to the front-door or whatever!
To throw anything away hurts them, really distresses them. There's a big difference between a proper hoarder and a lazy arse that lives in filth. One can clean up but can't be bothered, one doesn't want to because of the distress letting anything go would cause them.
Now the chap I saw on one of these programmes last week ( the care worker who had been depressed since his partner died) seemed like a desperate rabbit in the headlights; he clearly was not happy with the situation. Hence I guess that could be called an illness or rather more accurately I think dysfunctional behaviour.
On the other hand I have a friend (indeed he is my oldest friend we go back 45 years) whose house is cluttered to the point that I no longer go to stay there. I am not the only one of our circle who has stopped visiting either so it not just me being too fussy.
But thing is he and his partner are deliriously happy amid the chaos. He has no wish to change it and he pleads no excuses for how it is so I guess it is just a different life style choice in his case.