TVSquad

When it comes to hoarding stuff, I've gotten better over the years, but I'm still a fairly impressive pack-rat. For instance, I've got boxes of newspaper clippings in the basement dating back to the 1980s, when I wrote for the local daily paper.

Do I need this stuff? No, but it's part of my history, so I hang onto it. Maybe at some point in the distant future, I'll make a bunch of nice scrapbooks and pass them on to my kids. Then they'll have to figure out what to do with it. Isn't that how it works? People just keep handing their stuff down through the generations, and no one knows what to do with it. Eventually, no one even knows who it belonged to in the first place, and maybe it'll get tossed out.

But I must say, after watching A&E's Hoarders, I feel downright neat and tidy.

We're talking some major OCD issues with some of these folks. According to the show's official Web site, "each 60-minute episode of Hoarders is a fascinating look inside the lives of two different people whose inability to part with their belongings is so out of control that they are on the verge of a personal crisis."

The episode I watched featured a woman named Shirley with lots and lots of cats, living (and dying, apparently) amidst the clutter of her house. When all was said and done, animal control removed 70-some cats from the home; many of those were dead, some to the point of being skeletons. I'm no expert, but this woman must have no sense of smell whatsoever.

The other hoarder in this episode was Jake, a 21-year-old with severe OCD issues. This poor guy was a virtual prisoner amidst the garbage in the two-bedroom home he shares with his alcoholic dad. I can't imagine living in such filth. For one thing, it seems like you'd be sick all the time from germs and bacteria and who knows what else.

What I loved about Jake is that a therapist came in and worked with him on the emotional issues that caused him to keep every plastic bottle and snack wrapper that came into his house. With some of these types of shows, professional cleaners come in and make a clean sweep of things, but then the residents are left to try and figure out how to continue keeping the place clean. The therapist helped Jake figure out why he lived like that.

Hoarders is riveting TV, and hopefully, it'll help viewers who have OCD and hoarding issues. New episodes air Monday at 10 PM EST on A&E. Have you checked it out yet?