The Hoarder Next Door
The Channel 4 series The Hoarder Next Door (May 2012) documents the struggles of “extreme hoarders” living with their accumulated rubbish and trying to make life changing alterations to their behaviour.
Psychotherapist Stelios Kiosses is the expert on hand to help the subjects understand their hoarding and make amends. Complex emotional attachments and displacements along with OCD behaviours are prescribed a range of techniques to reduce the dependencies on the piles of stuff taking over their homes. The subjects invariably want to change and reduce the clutter but struggle to part with the even some of the most likeliest nominations for the bin.
Tina Vaughan is the subject of the episode I watched. “An aspiring artist with no room to work, 44-year-old Tina Vaughan is a compulsive hoarder of all things 1960s. An avid collector since she was a child, Tina lives in a cramped flat with two cats for company.”
The distinction between collecting and hoarding can be a fine line and the programme defined hoarding as, “When collections loose any sense of focus and turn to clutter.”
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-hoarder-nex…
Hoarding is a relatively newly recognised psychological disorder amongst professionals and is also thought to be on the rise (perhaps also a rise in recognised cases) with up to 3 million sufferers in the UK.*
* http://www.helpforhoarders.co.uk/
Further links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_hoarding
http://www.compulsive-hoarding.org/
