Postby Harriet » Wed Jul 20, 2011 6:18 pm
Watched the Hoarders episode lucylee mentioned yesterday, in parts as I had time on the 'puter. After 1st 20 mins I was already questioning why the producers decided to document these 2 stories.
The arcade man honestly wasn't a hoarder in my opinion. He just had an immense quantity of arcade machines in a building that wasn't zoned for it and he had to move them to one that was zoned for it in order to make money on the business. That's not someone who needs "Hoarders", that's someone who needs a moving company. He collected valuable things to make money off their use. His story could have been on "American Pickers", with Mike and Frank salivating over his antique pinball machines.
On the second, the dumpster-diving woman, I changed my mind in the 2nd 20 minutes. I had thought her explanation of "I hoard because a parent died" was just the same as many, many others. Yes, grieving your parent by neglecting their grandchildren does run up red flags for mental health, but how many times can you have this same type of hoarding explanation on the show. However, with the complete, violent collapse of the producers' attempts to offer help, I realized it was actually courageous of them to go ahead and show such a terrible failure on their part. Sometimes, you can't help at all, and I guess that's part of their stories, too. Ultimately, they may have put the son at risk, because when they arrived DSS would have taken him out of the home, but they (mostly the daughter) managed to do just enough work that he could stay, and he might have been better off away from there. Of course, at the end they said the woman and her husband were divorcing, so the son might have gone with father or big sister, or to the boarding school he wanted.