“I don’t know why things got out of control like they did.” – Kathleen
In the intro segment for this edition of Hoarding: Buried Alive, they do a little montage of what’s to come, and when someone says “there’s feces everywhere,” and then you see the feces everywhere in a house that screams BURN ME DOWN FOR THE INSURANCE MONEY RIGHT QUICK, you know it’s gonna be One of Those Episodes.
And then when Kathleen says, “It may look and feel like it’s hoarding, but I don’t feel that I’m hoarding,” it’s a statement that really cuts to the heart of what is serious mental illness that leads to homes being in condemnable, unlivable states.
We learn that it’s been more than three years since the house had a working sink, and the plumbing situation is such that 18-year-old Kate has to pipe water outside to a makeshift shower. This is the Pacific Northwest, so I imagine that it’s often quite a chilly one.
“I don’t know why things got out of control like they did,” Kathleen explains.
We see footage of the interior of the house, and it’s barely livable, with narrow pathways between teaming stacks of random boxes and junk. We then see a shot of son Taylor (Kate is his girlfriend, who lives with them), a teenager playing a video game with a taciturn look on his face as he sits in a room that looks like it’s about to collapse on him.
“It’s like walls of junk, we’re all just like buried,” Kate explains.
Kathleen’s shopping compulsion went out of control apparently after she was injured and out of work on disability. We also learn that Kathleen has abandoned her bedroom at this point and sleeps in another part of the modest 1,100 square foot home.
“One of the main problems in the kitchen,” Kathleen says calmly, “is that we’ve noticed that there’s mice.”
And at this, we see a shot of a little mouse popping up from behind a cacti plant. It almost looks like the start of a family friendly movie about a mouse who shows up to save the day.
Almost.
“The kitchen is covered in mice and feces,” Taylor adds.
So very far from almost.
As Kathleen calmly explains that she doesn’t know why she’s not able to “pull herself out of this,” you feel for her. She comes across as a nice lady who desperately needs both practical and mental health help.
Later in the episode, Kathleen’s friend Helen stops by the house, and she’s super kind about the horrid conditions she finds. She giggles a little in a supportive way at Kathleen’s explanations, and it’s hard to tell what the right line one should take in such a situation: kindness and support versus tough love intervention. In the end, I suppose, it’s up to close family and ultimately the hoarder themselves to seek out help.
A therapist named Dan Duncan is finally called in to talk to Kathleen, but soon they’re distracted by the mice that are roaming all over the kitchen.
Dan eventually gets her to open and relay that the hoarding dates back to a time when her son went through some kind of significant challenge – drugs, or some other mental health issue perhaps – and went away to something called Safe Center. Dan talks about how that lack of control that she had when her son was away for months may have lead her to do other things to make her feel like she had some control over her life.
One theme we see across these hoarder cases is that the mental health professionals seem to all agree that progress with hoarders requires a lengthy amount of time and small steps.
However, the health issues with regard to rodents and bugs are severe enough that an exterminator, Dave Ottovich, is brought in. Seeing his face when he sees the hoarder house and how disturbing the situation is. “The kitchen… is a hazard,” he says.
And when we see the crud and mouse droppings all over the kitchen, we know that he’s approximately ten billion percent correct.
While Kathleen believes there are five mice in her kitchen, Dave relays that the rodent infestation has been taking place over a period of years and that there are likely hundreds, even thousands, of rodents to deal with.
Eventually, Kathleen is convinced to start clearing out the house, including the couch that we find out she’s been sleeping on for the last six years. In the space where the couch was? All kinds of rodent-related hideousness.
Eventually, the kitchen gets completely cleaned and it looks magically transformed. The best part is that the rodent problem has been taken care of… for the time being. Dave Ottovich says that there’s still a long way to go.
Meanwhile, we flip back and forth during the episode to New Hampshire, where we learn “49-year-olf Jamie is making life for her family a living hell.”
Here we get another weirdly similar looking house to Kathleen’s: stacks of things everywhere that are somewhat organized and yet there’s a mix of trash and normal looking stuff. But like everywhere.
“Personally, I don’t have any trouble getting through the house,” Jamie tells us as we see her squeezing her way past a wall of junk-meets-crap to get out of her bedroom.
Son Andrew relays that his mom doesn’t think that she has a problem. And Jamie corroborates that with, “It may look like I’m hoarding but I don’t feel that I’m hoarding.”
And that’s a statement that a therapist could spend a session or two helping to unpack, I’d think.
There’s a weird dynamic between Jamie and her husband, Dave, and it’s mostly because Dave is super non-direct. You get the sense right away that he doesn’t have the skillset or the gumption to confront his wife – his move seems to be to turn bright red and softly say things like “you can’t walk through here” – yet clearly he knows that there’s a severe problem that is affecting all of their lives.
And that’s before daughter Naomi is brave (or foolish) enough to bring her fiancé Tim home from college. Not only that, but he’s planning to sleep over at the house.
“Jesus, this is disgusting,” he says, which is the most relatable thing anyone has ever said on a reality TV show in any situation.
It seems maybe Naomi is more on the foolish side of the spectrum as she simply says to Tim, “Please don’t start.” Well, maybe “foolish” is too harsh, but she definitely seems like an enabler of what’s an unhealthy and unsafe situation.
As they enter a room that is piled up to the ceiling in junk, Tim says, “This is ridiculous,” and at that point Naomi can only agree with, “I know… I know.”
Then Tim says something that makes me chuckle, simply because how he says it: “Down here it’s wicked clutter.” And then he really gets on a roll: “There’s just an obnoxious amount of stuff.”
We then see Jamie preparing a meal in the rancid kitchen and my fun feelings evaporate. It’s nauseating to watch it, and I can only imagine how awful it would be to eat food that comes out of that kitchen.
Jamie agrees to talk to Dr. David Dia even though she won’t admit to being a hoarder.
It’s rather fascinating when Dr. Dia can’t get Jamie to agree to select one single item in a room teeming in stuff to give away to a donation center. The example of a stuffed bear that Dr. Dia hypothetically posed as something to consider, Jamie quickly connected it to a “collection” of stuffed animals (we see a pile of them in a corner) and couldn’t possibly let go of it.
When Dr. Dia sits Jamie down with her family, she uses a lot of deflection and avoidance in dealing with what they tell her. One daughter ends up crying, saying that she doesn’t think anything is going to change with her mother’s condition.
Kate Alitieri, a professional organizer, is brought in to help figure out what to do with the chaotic situation. You can see how painful change is for Jamie when she argues with Kate about throwing out a bag of marshmallows (she likes them “hard”), and soon she accusing people of “backstabbing” her for wanting to get rid of stuff.
Kate tells the camera that the issue is all the more serious with Jamie because she’s not even able to admit that she has a hoarding problem.
Six weeks later, the living room doesn’t look great, but it doesn’t look fully condemnable. So I guess you could say that there’s been a small amount of progress. Perhaps most significantly, the kids’ rooms are no longer as dreadfully cluttered.
However, Jamie still won’t admit that she’s a hoarder.
“I just haven’t put the things where they need to be put,” she says.