best movie i've ever seen.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Most hoarders would keep their hoarding a secret from families and friends for years. The hoarding becomes intense and the hoarder often risks losing their home or relationships over it. Every episode has two hoarders in two different parts of the country. When they finally reach out to help, the hoarder gets a psychological help and a professional cleaner. The hoarder must decide to what to keep and get rid of. For most of us who don't have a hoarding problem, we don't understand why they can't get rid of obvious garbage. After the hoarder finally gets rid of the first item to the garbage, there is a breakthrough. Often, the hoarders end up fighting over little pieces of items. The hoarders and their loved ones must face the issue of the hoarding. Usually hoarding has nothing to do with the item itself, the underlying issues beneath the hoarder is usually to cover up the pain and agony. Hoarding has become more open in today's society. The relatives are often at their wit's end sometimes in dealing with the hoarder. They can't understand how difficult it must be for the hoarder to let something go.

OCDs and especially hoarding fascinate me. As this is a US reality TV series, I didn't have high hopes to begin with. However, the concept of involving a psychologist into the process and providing after care funds for the participants gave me a positive surprise. In the first few seasons, the series really focuses on the mental part of the hoarding. You can see how hard it is for people to let go and they even fail some times. There isn't always success. I really did like that part. However, in the following seasons it gets worse and worse. The show is trying to have more sensational cases, more extreme filth or huge family fights. The last season is not a show about hoarding anymore, but a very weird mash up of not well done Horror, Home Remodel, Makeover, Family Crisis. While I found it not helpful to show the family the "stat the house is in" in season 5, in my opinion it is completely useless to spend a night in the home and explain to a shaky hand cam how scary and disgusting it is. The first few seasons are a nice watch, but I would recommend to stop after Season 4. Nothing good coming after that.

Having a full-blown hoarding mother and some tendencies myself, a friend suggested I watch a few episodes in order to better see how it affected me as a child and how serious it is. At first I thought it might be the typical exploitative program, but after watching the first episode I was having useful insights. In each episode one or two situations are introduced. Then, some kind of intervention is attempted, usually in response to some external event like threatened eviction or the city being called in. We are able to see how professional organizers approach the hoarders, and how the hoarders respond. In particular, we see all the ways they deny or minimize the problem and thus stay stuck in it.After watching several episodes, I brought my mother over so we could watch together. Each episode turned into a few hours of regular pausing and discussion of what we were seeing. It allowed more objectivity, since we were partly discussing other people rather than ourselves. My mother reported that she had felt enthusiasm and done some cleaning of her own house later that day. There was one professional organizer who had an amazing attitude of respect for the hoarder, not pressuring but simply assisting where possible, in order to achieve the most long-term change. I will always remember her as the model for how I can be towards my mother, rather than judgmental and ultimately harmful towards her progress, not that feeling such things isn't completely understandable.Even though the show is probably mere entertainment for most people (nothing wrong with that!), it's great that it also serves such a valuable role for viewers who also deal with hoarding as well.

Although I've one seen one episode, "Patty and Bill", this show will have me watching from now on, if I don't buy the DVDs first. Reality shows aren't my thing usually, but the situations shown here seem real enough and I really felt for the participants and more so, for their families.There's a lot compressed into "Patty and Bill", and the crew certainly put together something both engrossing and scary. The matter of fact way the team carried out the job to clean out the properties, with interruptions from Patty and Bill, must sure have taken a lot out of them. Of all those shown, I felt the most for Bill's daughter with her beautifully clean and tidy room amid what seemed like a builder's wreckers yard.As someone who's helped to similarly clean out properties though not to such a necessary degree of size and in such a short time, I salute all concerned. What they achieved in three days seemed amazing, despite the final results not bringing satisfactory conclusions in either case.