WHICH former TV actor-turned C-list film star is worried that his mother’s severe hoarding problem – she’s still living with items from the ’70s – will become public?
Every month he travels back home and hires a professional cleaning service, but a few weeks later, mom’s junkyard is back in business!
I feel extremely sorry for whoever this is. His Mom needs help, but she has got to want to clean up. He probably needs to let it get so bad she has legal consequences. It is not his fault in any way, shape or form. Poor man. : (
ReplyDeleteNew show alert-Hoarders Celebrity Edition
ReplyDeleteSeriously? Someone is ashamed of their mom for this and afraid it'll go public? Kind of sounds like a jerk. He should be paying for his mom's treatment if he's so worried.
ReplyDeleteThere is something seriously wrong with those people. The one's they have on that show are completely out of touch with reality and beyond hoarders IMO. I think it's one thing to accumulate junk (um, collectibles), but when you leave garbage all over the floor and never take it to the curb, in addition to letting your animals shit up the place, that's a whole other story. Yuck, just yuck.
ReplyDeleteMy father is a hoarder. I am trying to help him and this morning I opened two boxes - one had a dead mouse on top, the other a mouse nest. He wouldn't let me just toss them (boxes of children's toys) and insisted on sorting through them first. I'm done. I just can't help anymore. First it was tedious, now it's getting vomit-inducing.
ReplyDeleteLet me add, this is at his $1.5 million beach house, not his $2.5 million regular house. So when you're rich you're not a hoarder, you're just eccentric.
RQ, I don't think it's cool to castigate someone for being ashamed of this behavior. It can be embarassing to have someone in your family suffering from a mental issue. Yes, you feel sorry for them and want to help them, which he's clearly trying to do, but it's also very frustrating and embarassing. That's a natural response. I'm not saying it's great, but it is normal and natural. You can love someone and want to help them but still be uncomfortable about their issues.
ReplyDeleteMy husband is a hoarder, not like on TV but one none the less. He only hoards his own things though, and makes himself feel better by getting rid of other peoples things either by throwing them away or putting them away.
ReplyDeleteIn order to throw away the free junk he gets I have to double bag it and cover it with garbage. If I throw it away in the kitchen trash, he will go through it and take it back out. The good news is he keeps everything well organized, even has peg boards covered in multiples of things like vinyl furniture repair kits he got a good deal on. Oh we don't have any vinyl furniture.
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ReplyDeleteTexshan - I'm not castigating and I don't care if you don't think it's "cool"., I'm asking why he's expending energy worrying about being embarrassed instead of using his energy and film star funds to get his mother some long-term help. As someone who lost a family member to mental illness, there should be more compassion, less worrying about being embarrassed.
ReplyDeleteTopher Grace?
ReplyDeleteKevin James
ReplyDelete@RocketQueen - because hoarders don't WANT treatment.
ReplyDeleteYou can fork over all the money in the world. You can stand there with bags and offer to sort and toss. You can suggest they go to counseling. You can offer to go with them. You can stomp your feet and threaten to leave. You can promise to buy things again if they're ever missed. You can work and worry and live in dread of the authorities. You can pay cleaners and climb over boxes, just trying to get through another day. You can cry yourself to sleep and wake up with nightmares that you're being suffocated, and refill your prescriptions for ambien and zoloft to get through another week. You can stand there and try not to die inside when someone you loves makes it obvious - over and over and over again - that their 'stuff' is more important to them than you ever were or ever will be.
But you can't, cannot, no matter how hard or long you try, get a hoarder to go to treatment unless they want to.
The actor doesn't have to worry about getting discovered. No one cares enough about you until you're at least a B. If he were an A list...then he'd need to worry.
ReplyDeleteThat's fine, Fawn Neun, but it's still a mental illness, and I wish people would stop being ashamed of family members with mental illness. The stigma does none of us any good.
ReplyDeleteI think Topher Grace too because of the 70's comment and he is definitely C list.
ReplyDeleteI also think it's nice of him to try and help his mom. If you think about it, if he weren't famous who would care that she is a hoarder, so he probably feels bad that there might be an expose on her because of him.
As a packrat/horribly messy person myself, I can sympathize with this. It's a tough road to travel when you feel you shouldn't throw away anything and feeling guilty for giving things to charity when you've spent good money on the stuff.
ReplyDeleteRocketQueen - Nowhere does it say that he's worried that knowledge of the hoarding problem will affect him. From what I've read of kids of hoarders (I found a group of blogs not that long ago), it's more likely that he's worried about what people will think of her. (Okay, probably a mix of the two)
ReplyDeleteI don't think I've seen/read a single story where the children weren't worried about people finding out- mostly because it's only now that people are understanding it's a mental illness. And all of them struggled with balancing their love for their parent with the ongoing sense that their parents care more about the hoard then them.
I just hope that the celeb is getting therapy... it can't be easy to deal with.
My friend's elderly dad is a hoarder (mostly books but other "bargains" that he can't pass up, like waffle irons and bags of clothing he'll never wear and package upon sealed package of computer courses). He has no financial worries and she doesn't begrudge him spending his money on what he likes but she's terrified that he'll trip and fall over the mountains of CRAP he has piled up all over his house. She's been over there each weekend this blistering summer, hauling crap to the curb and he's right behind her picking through it and bringing stuff right back into the house. For him, the items are comforting so she cleans out just enough to keep a safe passageway inside the house.
ReplyDeleteImmiediately thought topher grace
ReplyDeleteThere's a terrific outpatient program at UCLA if the parent lives in LA.
ReplyDeletei grew up as a child of 2 hoarders. i lived in a house where my friends were forbidden to come over. i had to climb over piles of stuff to get out of bed, and slide through narrow aisles of piles of stuff to get anywhere.
ReplyDeletethe hoard was everything from 20yr old newspapers, baby clothes (even when my parents hadnt had kids for 10+ years), unmatched peices of tupperware, broken electronics, collectables, books, and food.....god the food. enough that if one of the piles collapsed and trapped us in the house we'd still be able to survive for years.
ontop of it all my mom hoarded animals. at one point, amongst all of the stuff we also had 25 animals at once. the smell was pungent. one time, the entire house (which was carpeted) became infested with fleas that took years to control and get rid of. i couldnt wear socks indoors because my feet would become blackened by the fleas.
i grew up embarassed and ashamed because i wasnt allowed to have friends over, because the kids my age treated me strangly because i always had to turn down play dates because i couldnt reciprocate or invite them over.
i grew up lacking basic skills of how to interact with people, have someone over, clean, organize and more.
mental disease or no, growing up in that kind of enviroment is hard. even if you arnt embarassed by the parent for their behavior, you may be embarassed by the conditions they are living in and your own inability to do anything about it.
Whitney - we must be reading different blinds. It clearly says the actors is worried that his mother's condition will become public. Assuming her close friends and family know, the only person that "public" news would affect is himself.
ReplyDeleteI totally hear you, headrot. Really. I myself grew up in a home of addiction where I didn't have friends over because I was embarrassed of the scenes going on in my house. It made me resentful. But after losing my dad to his illness, I'm a little ashamed now at having been so embarrassed of him. His disease should not and did not reflect on ME, and doesn't to this day. Instead of being embarrassed, I wish we would have recognized his illness for what it was and tried harder to get him help. We didn't; he died. End of story.
I should add that his addiction was caused BY mental illness - mostly likely bi-polar for which he was never treated because it wasn't identified.
ReplyDeleteMy mother is a hoarder, I am a lover of cluttery decor I have to admit. But living with stuff from the 70's doesn't make you a hoarder surely???
ReplyDeleteI have an exquisite teak cabinet in my dining room from the 70's, I have a gorgeous long sofa in the basement and horrors, a few vases from the 1950's. I have a number of lamps that would have been from the 60's or 70's too but no exact age because they came from eBay.
Fawn and Whitney, thank you for your comments. RQ, it's only natural to be embarrassed by a relative's mental illness, especially one that is so potentially visible. I grew up with a hoarder dad. We had a five-bedroom house (I have one brother), but two of the bedrooms were so full of his crap that whenever we had guests I would get kicked out of my room because we didn't have a guest room. He would collect hundreds of little tins and containers (Altoids, Sucrets, film roll containers) because "they could be handy to store things in." He kept reams of dot-matrix printouts for decades. When my parents downsized to a condo, he was pissed because he was the only one who "lost" things in the move. He didn't "lose" them ... my mom and I tossed a ton of junk because he wanted to keep everything but wouldn't help pack. When he died, my mom and I found receipts for dinners they had when they were dating -- 34 years earlier. It was a nightmare. And it was embarrassing to have rooms full of junk in my home that I had to hide from friends. I'm not going to apologize for my feelings, nor should anyone else. People's feelings are what they are. There's no "right" way or "wrong" way to feel about these situations.
ReplyDeleteNor will I apologize for my feelings. In no way did I insult your feelings, I objected to being called "uncool" for my OWN feelings on the matter.
ReplyDeleteHaven't been to CDAN in months. I see some things are still very much the same.
ReplyDelete