Which Hoarders therapist is the best?

I've never liked Robin Zasio

Robin Zasio looks like Tonya Harding.

I think Chabaud had a stroke

Dr. Vivian Vance: "This house has sufficient."

I'm surprised that Zasio's getting so much love

These shows are so addicting

These people don't need mollycoddling by therapists. They just need a good beating.

No love for Tolin? I think he's one of the better ones

Lol @ OP typing Dr. Chaubaud’s Louisiana accent. Love her. Sorry to hear she had a stroke.

Melva is probably most effective to me. though.

Whatever you do don’t call Stericlean. They are franchised and don’t seem to have much oversight.

When they're able to salvage the homes containing some of the worst hoards, I have to wonder if the houses still smell.

It would seem impossible to really eradicate the stench of decades of accumulated filth.

r9 my favorite Chabaud moment is the episode in which she entered a hoarder's home in open-toed sandals and stood in the bathroom surrounded by shit.

Forget therapist. Get a dumpster. Clean the place out. Hoarder will have good cry. Returns to empty house.

Dr. Chabaud seems a little "out there," but I think that probably makes her a good therapist.

You know it's gonna be a good one when Dr. Melva Green arrives on the scene. Waist high piles of shit don't negate her freshness.

My favorite episode of these shows was the one where the wife was about to reveal to her unsuspecting husband that she had rented an entire vacant store in their downtown and filled it to the brim with more of her crap.

He knew of the two off site storage spaces he was paying for, but he didn't have a clue about the rented store.

Hilarity ensued.

Dr. Suzanne Chabaud is my favorite.

Zasio is in TOP FORM in this episode!!

I love it when Dr. Melva Green changes wigs mid-episode.

"You can't heal it if you can't feel it!"

I've been watching a lot of old episodes.

Something about Robin Zasio doesn't ring true to me. On the other hand, Suzanne Chabaud seems the most genuine.

He doesn't appear in many episodes, but David Tolin is good

David Tolin was a hot cub a few years ago, but he let himself pork out

Not to derail the thread topic, but Matt Paxton (Extreme Cleaning Specialist, esq.) is also pretty sexy to me. He carries weight pretty well and has southern charm. Like I’m sure he’s sucked a dick in a barn. He may have been cleaning said barn, but I feel he probably sucked that penis. But he has 7 kids, so he’s surely lost by now. He also looks like he gets sloppy drunk.

I find Matt Paxton more effective and hands-on than some of the therapists, r25

A classic!

The most compelling case to me was Sandra Cowart and the gay couple who got sick of her bullshit.

That was an epic episode r29. That house was gorgeous, and she completely trashed it. She was a successful interior designer with a beautiful house and quite well-off and she destroyed it all, living in a van or camper which was also hoarded.

I understand that hoarding is a mental illness, but most of these hoarders are so nasty, selfish and spiteful it's pretty much impossible to feel sorry for them.

Robin Zasio, always perfectly coiffed and dressed to the nines..........and surrounded by piles of garbage and human shit in a house that looks like it's going to collapse all around her any second. Even squalor and human feces aren't going to stop her glamour.

I always feel that Zasio emits a very thinly veiled disdain for clients.

Dr. Zasio’s skin has to be leather at this point.

My husband and I had a drinking game where we drank every time Mark Pfeffer threatened to call Adult Protective Services.

Dr Melva. Sympathetic but hardcore when she needs to be.

I haven't watched the show, but at the end of his life, my father was a hoarder. He would refuse my offers of hiring housekeepers/caretakers until the situation got so bad, he was overrun with German cockroaches and finally called me. He had a cat that he never cleaned up after, and the smell was so bad, when we opened the door, you could smell it a half a block away. I spent $10,000 throwing everything away (probably threw away his will, as all the paperwork and books smelled), ripping out the rugs, putting in new flooring, electrician, plumber, bio-hazard people, new furniture and new furniture. Instead of throwing away the garbage (he was ion oxygen at that point), he piled it neatly in layers on the kitchen floor, with a path through it. We had to throw the whole fridge away- when i opened it up, it was packed with black molding food. Mind you, I was in L.A. and he was in the Bay Area, with my brother living fairly close by in Santa Cruz- my brother and he were contentious.

When I asked him why he didn't take me up on the offer previously, he cited pride and embarrassment. It's a good thing I did it when he asked, because when he died suddenly 4 years later, I didn't have to deal with all that then. I'm trying to do the Swedish Death Cleaning myself in my storage, and it's very hard to do. I'm hoping the hoarding genes don't kick in.

I see Dr. Zasio's had work done.

Dr. Zasio is a total asshole.

I like Suzanne and Robin.

Yes, that was a great episode, R12, and a weird moment. And the follow up episode in which she dismisses the hoarder is great too. And everyone has that fantastic Lousiana accent in those episodes.

Why the hell is compulsive gambler Matt Paxton not on the poll?

If I were a hoarder, I'd like the help of Dr. Chabaud.

The Shana episode was the nastiest. She hoarded just trash and her unrine and feces in plastic bottles. I believe they said when she moved in with a relative when her house got so bad she was still taking dumps in water jugs and saving them. Which just proves how mentally ill some of these people really are.

The first two episodes of the new season were excellent but I prefer one hour episodes.

Hoarders are too coddled by these people. Not taking your trash out, living among animal feces and urine, this is filth not hoarding. As a relative I’d be trashing everything in a giant construction dumpster right in front of them.

I think the family members of Hoarders have a hard time. You can't just throw their stuff in the trash. Well, you can do it once. Thereafter, you won't be allowed to set foot in their house.

It really is like dealing with an alcoholic or an addict. You can't just make them stop.

I like “Hoarding Expert” Dorothy Breininger better than any of the therapists. She sometimes gets to the heart of the issue more directly than the therapists do. I don’t love the 90 minute episodes, but I do like how they now just do one hoarder per episode. I know they have a mental illness, but they are so frustrating to watch! There was one lady from Holly Springs, MS a few years ago who was totally delusional and I think they were only able to remove a portion of her stuff. A friend of mine is from that town, and his family still lives there. (BEAUTIFUL old homes there) Everyone knows that crazy lady and is sick of her shit.

Dr. Z seems like a shit stirrer to me, sometimes literally like the episode where she repeatedly asked the hoarder’s family members “your grandmother was defecating on the floor…how does that make you feel?” She just kept bringing it up.

The hoarders react more positively to the organizers than to the therapists. I think the hoarders feel judged by the therapists and don't want people picking their brains apart.

I always want to set the houses on fire 🔥 just after I bring the hoarders out on Hannibal Lector dollies

r45 gets it. You can't just throw shit out. The people will go right back to hoarding.

I would imagine that hoarding has a high recidivism rate.

CANDY FINNIGAN! Yes I know she's not on this show, but she will always be the correct answer for just about anything.

I love Candy. I like how she gets all fired up and emotional when kids are involved. She KNOWS, because she neglected her kids and chose the bottle.

They should do a Hoarders/Intervention crossover episode.

I don't know why Dr. Zasio is in the lead.

In this episode, Dorothy seemed far more therapeutic than Robin, who (as is her wont) can barely conceal her disdain for the hoarder.

David Tolin, PhD is one of the authors of this terrific self help workbook. Lots of great strategies and it also includes insightful sidebars addressed to helpers.

I like Tolin, r55.

Here's a few episodes with some of the most extreme cases.

It's probably more fruitful to treat the family members of hoarders vs. trying to treat the hoarders. So many people fall into dysfunctional relationships with hoarders. It's probably easier to get the family member to see that they don't have to live their life at the mercy of a hoarder.