Hoarders is a weekly 60-minute documentary on the lives of two different people and their habit of compulsive hoarding. Compulsive hoarding is a mental disorder that causes a person to need to accumulate things, even if they are useless, worthless, or unsanitary. The show documents extreme cases and the impact that the habit has on a person’s family and friends. Specialists are brought in to try and clean up their living space, which has sometimes experienced irreversible damage. One woman had a room full of diapers from when her daughter was a child, and the daughter was now in her twenties. Another woman could not go anywhere in her house and ate, slept, sat, and did all of her work on one plastic chair in the middle of mounds of garbage. Hoarding has emotional and physical consequences, as one woman almost had to get her legs amputated because of an infection she got from all of the garbage in her house. This show is an example of our fascination with people who have disabilities and our desire to watch things that are outside of the norm. Whenever I watch the show I am completely disgusted with the things that I see in the houses, but I can’t stop watching. There is a definite demand for programs that show real people with real problems, and Hoarders is just one example of that. The people receive help and therapists try to help them see that what they are doing is harmful and alienating themselves from the rest of the world. A great part in the show is when the individual realizes that she does need help. The moment is usually an emotional one where she is surrounded by those who care about her most. As much as we love disturbing stories, we love happy endings even more. We connect with the person and are now sympathetic with their problem because we think that they want to change their ways.
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