The Hoarder Tv Show
In fact, the implicit promise of the series – that its subjects can be helped with the combination of public exposure (via the Hoarders camera crew filming) and private counseling – was shown to be a joke. Betty, Paul, Jill, and Bill all reverted to their pack-rat ways pretty much as soon as the Hoarders crew pulled out of their driveways, continuing to inflict misery upon their families.
Stuffed: Food Hoarders dives into the most overrun kitchens in America, following 3 families that buy too much and can't throw anything away. Corrine has an autistic son and she makes his world even more confusing by letting mounds of food and baking items overflow into other rooms. John's house was once clean. Now, there is mystery meat in the fridge and because of the mess, he can't make dinner for his son. Sheri appears like everyone else but she can't stop buying food. Her basement looks like a mini-mart.
In a TV show debuting tonight on TLC, seemingly normal people exhibit some pretty strange behavior. They jump into dumpsters, steal parts of newspapers off of neighbors’ porches, and stuff their collections into elaborate storage units and under their kids’ beds. They also save tons of money on obsessively plotted shopping excursions, but that’s almost beside the fact.
The NY Times’ review says that the show “passes for a docu-series on people who are unhealthily committed to savings, but it’s really a revenge fantasy and a heist flick all in one.” The Times piece also points out that the people featured on “Extreme Couponing” aren’t really desperate or particularly poor. Truly poor people say they don’t have the time to clip coupons, and they’d never pay to get coupons through a coupon-clipping service. They also couldn’t afford the homes nor the storage space used for stockpiling years worth of paper towels, toothpaste, and tomato sauce brought home by the expert couponers:
I want to tell the general public that couponers are not all hoarders. I advise people to live by the “rule of two” or, for those who wish, the “rule of three.” That means you try to keep two (or three) of an item in your house so that you never run out and hopefully never have to pay full price because you need an emergency replacement. I do NOT advocate going into stores and picking up bins of product and dumping them into your cart (something that was shown on this show).
Christiana Bratiotis, director of the Hoarding Research Project at the Boston University School of Social Work, says cognitive behavioral therapy can help. Prior to a recent study the school did with the Elder Services of Merrimack Valley in Massachusetts, the agency used only big clean ups to clear the clutter. She said 100 percent of the time, the elders began hoarding again immediately. And they were angry, distressed and distrustful of anyone (family members, social workers) who tried to intervene again.
An MSN blogger also noted that it would be impossible to replicate many of the purchases shown on TV—for one thing, because a supermarket involved (Safeway) changed its policies. But more importantly, this post raises two questions: When does stockpiling become hoarding? and Are the extreme couponers greedy?
That squares with the Orange County task force's experience. Mark Odom notes that an effective strategy for them is to emphasize "harm reduction." He said by invoking regulation enforcers, such as landlords or fire departments, hoarders had "exterior motivation" to clear at least some of the clutter.
For that matter, studies have shown that coupons—whether used in extreme ways or not—are used in much greater numbers by affluent consumers, not poor people . The point is that, while it makes perfect sense to use the occasional coupon to save money, figuring out a way to game the system on a broader level requires more time, strategy, and patience than most shoppers can afford. That’s just not a game most consumers want to play.
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Shopping in the manner depicted on this show is darn near impossible to do in “real life.” From what I gather from other coupon chat boards, the shoppers featured on this show were allowed to pre-order items and tell the stores exactly what they would need. It would be darn near impossible for a regular, not-on-TV couponer to walk into a store and buy 100 of one item.
In the March issue of the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry , R. Scott Mackin, also from UCSF, and a team of researchers found that about 15 percent of older adults with depression had "severe compulsive hoarding behaviors," while just 2 to 5 percent of non-depressed older adults are hoarders.
"We all love a good train wreck," says Mark Odom, clinical consultant to the Orange County (Calif.) Task Force on Hoarding . And, he says, many people — including psychiatrists — think hoarders are obsessive-compulsive. It's even listed that way in the bible of psychiatric disorders, the DSM IV .