Rescuers cut thru roof to get to dead hoarder
 

:( I read about this this morning.

We are learning, more and more, that there are people living like this every single day in America. It's like a crisis or something. I can't help wondering if there were hoarders back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. The reason being is that people took classes in Home Economics, Industrial Economics, etc. thus learning how to take care of their homes, their surroundings and themselves. We've lost something along the way, and I wonder how it happened.

I'm claustrophobic.

There were. I thought I posted about that in a thread about the hoarder reality shows.

I will try to find the website with the list of famous hoarders from the 1950s, etc.

ETA: Found it http://www.squalorsurvivors.com/squalor/famous.shtml

Hoarding, as with most things, has existed for generations. We simply have more access to information now because of the Internet and reality television, so it looks like things are "new" when they aren't.

Yeah, I really don't think taking a Home Economics course is going to help people in this type of situation. It has almost nothing to do with keeping a house clean and everything to do with state of mind.

The show on A&E is absolutely horrific. But I am addicted to it! The hoarding experts and cleaning crews are always finding dead petrified kitten skeletons under piles and piles of crap in these houses! And then the hoarder always cries and says "No, I need that. Don't throw it away-it's special" For the love...
It would be one thing if you choose to fester away in your own trash and excrement, but so many of these people have children that are living in this situation with them. Unexcusable.

Exactly. This is a form of mental illness, not a lack of knowledge on how to clean.

Beyond the "fact" (some of us consider it a fact but not everyone does) that this is a form of mental illness, LikeASista now knows that hoarding existed generations ago and we simply have quicker and more encompassing ways to disseminate info now.

I just finished reading your link, and thank you for this. This is quite interesting. I chuckled only a little bit when I read about Beethoven, as I know many musicians and composers, and while I hesitate to call them hoarders, I have referred to them as packrats. However, with the images we've seen from A&E (which is not a laughing matter), I assume hoarding would involve much more extreme cases. But then again, as I'm sure I will learn, there are probably degrees of hoarding.

Yes there are degrees :), and quite possibly social restrictions in the past- wealth, servants, fires, size of homes - that kept some of the worst type of hoarding we see on TV today from reaching those depths. And at least in some cases - the Great Depression, poverty in general - keeping many things may have been a positive adaptation, although you would still need to get rid of them to benefit.

TLC also has a hoarding show that I like better in some ways and not as well in others.

WHOA not far from where I live at all.

There's a thin line between being a packrat and being a hoarder. The level of cleanliness and organization is why many packrats "get away with" collecting things and rarely throwing things away. Hoarders (in the "squalor" sense) don't "get away with" it because the packrat behavior has gone so far that you no longer have the ability to be clean and organized. I don't doubt that many packrats share the same obsessive and dependent traits that hoarders tend to.

Edith and Edie Beale lived in squalor because they were impoverished hoarders, which received national attention because of the Onasis name and the fact that they lived in a hugemongous mansion. As Drolefile alluded to, it's really difficult to be an A&E type of hoarder when you live in a 28 room mansion.

But, Langley Collyer's case (the first one on the link) mirrors what happened in the CNN story for this thread.

I like TLC's "Hoarding: Buried Alive" more.

I watch A&E's "Intervention." A&E's "Hoarders" and "Obsessed" are too much like "Intervention" for me.

I like "Intervention" more than TLC's "Addicted."