“Hoarders” also aims to change the behavior of the participants at the center of its show — “disposophobics” is the clinical term, people whose pathological urge to collect or inability to throw away items is slowly damaging, even destroying, their lives and homes. Like the network’s Emmy-winning “Intervention,” “Hoarders” isn’t merely an exercise in voyeurism but an attempt at turbo-powered rehabilitation; houses are emptied of truckloads of toys and clothes, kitchens are disinfected, and therapists are employed to change lifelong habits in the span of only 48 hours. But in the midst of a recession and a mortgage crisis, “Hoarders” may actually be changing the way the way we think about our own relationship to stuff. At the very least, it’s changed how we think about hoarding.

The term “hoarder” once brought to mind a lady on a sofa covered in squirming cats, or tragic characters like the Beales of “Grey Gardens,” but compulsive hoarding has now become a recognizable disorder. Over the phone, professional organizer Geralin Thomas, who often appears on “Hoarders,” likens this shift to the evolution of our perception of ADHD. “People used to say, ‘Just discipline them and they’ll sit still,’” she says. “That’s not true and we know it.” Thomas seems to be an endless well of patience and understanding; other professional organizers who appear on the show have lost their cool while struggling to convince a hoarder to part with, say, an aspirin or a container of spoiled yogurt.

The behavior is as understandable, as human as it is perplexing, and the show makes many of us shudder with recognition: Heather Havrilesky called the experience of watching hoarders-themed shows “creepily cathartic,” mentioning how quickly the show’s message propelled her to shuttle bags of old stuff to the local Goodwill. On the day I spoke with Kim, my washing machine had broken down in the middle of a cycle and my hall closet was filled with the contents of my hamper that hadn’t made it into the wash. I’d had a busy week and hadn’t vacuumed up the cat hair, which was accumulating in big fluffy clouds hanging out by the baseboards; I’d made breakfast and the skillet was soaking in the sink, next to a blender which had a gluelike film of strawberry seeds covering its glass and metal innards. I told Kim that the thought of a film crew showing up to examine my sprawling mess gave me the sweaty sensation of someone afraid that her underwear would end up being seen by 2.5 million people.

“I’m a private person and it wasn’t my cup of tea, certainly,” she said. “It’s my single biggest vulnerability.”

Kim’s decision to be on the show was due in part to the effect her hoarding had on her romantic relationships and her job. Though she dated and had a busy social life (“Literally I’d gotten into a phase where all I wanted to do was not be here” in the house, she said of life before the show), she was too ashamed and embarrassed of the mess to let anyone into her home. She would spend hours trying to clear a corner of one room only to become discouraged by the sheer volume of the mess. “The pride factor isn’t there when it’s just one tiny area,” she said. “It’s not the same as having the whole thing done … it was an amount of work that didn’t seem attainable, in my perception.”

A striking theme of the show is hopelessness. It’s not uncommon for its subjects to express suicidal thoughts, like Gordon, the patriarch of a family of four who appears in Part 2 of this season’s premiere and frequently wishes aloud that he would die of a heart attack before the cleanup finishes. Often those who despair the most have been living without plumbing, eating takeout in bed because their kitchens are nonfunctional; some are facing eviction or intervention by either adult or child protective services. It seems the longer the hoarder has been living in a state of chaos, the dimmer the outlook.

With its tales of excess, the show is cannily designed for our consumer age, but “Hoarders” began as an accident: The producers had an idea for a show about flipping houses, and in the process discovered a home that had been inhabited by a hoarder who had since died and willed the house to her sister. It wasn’t exactly aspirational programming for the real estate set, but the story of this messy house gripped the producers, and so “Hoarders” was born.

Now a verifiable cult hit, the show also attracts a certain rubbernecking point-and-sneer audience, and it is no surprise that it has elicited quite a bit of online scorn. “What kind of mother in her right mind leaves animal poop all over the floor and doesn’t bother to clean it up?” asks one angry (though, it must be said, somewhat reasonable) commenter on the “Hoarders” IMDb page. Viewers wonder how hard it would be to simply buy a vacuum cleaner or set aside a few hours to ply the rotting mangoes from the crisper in the fridge. Still others view the subjects of the show as a sort of patriotic affront, as if the state of a little house in Oklahoma could disgrace our entire nation. The show’s hoarders, writes one heckler, “take the great bounty this country has to offer for granted and live like pigs because they’re lazy.”

But what makes “Hoarders” so fascinating is how its participants defy one dismissive description; there really is no typical hoarder. One of the most remarkable stories “Hoarders” has ever featured comes in Part 2 of the third season premiere: Sir Patrick, whose title comes not as a result of affectation but rather, he explains, courtesy of Prince Charles in recognition of his humanitarian work. Sir Patrick refers to his home as Camelot — it’s filled with silver plates and Oriental screens, dolls and ornate lighting fixtures, relics of a spending habit that threatens to bankrupt him. He describes himself as being “addicted to beauty” because of a difficult upbringing, and as therapist Dr. Suzanne Chabaud gazes around his kitchen at the ornamental statues of waiters, she suggests that they are Sir Patrick’s company. He agrees. “How can you say what something is worth when it is so deeply personal?” Chabaud wonders. And how is it possible to discard something that has taken on a Velveteen Rabbit-like life, almost becoming an extension of the self. We all know what it’s like to hold on to something long past its expiration date. But where does sentimentality end and hoarding begin?

“A lot of people call me because they wonder if they’re hoarders,” says Geralin Thomas. But one key distinction is that unlike record collectors, who will happily show you their rare vinyl copy of some obscure band, hoarders feel shame and the urge to hide — and the show makes them realize they’re not alone. Thomas and other organizers have seen an uptick in calls and e-mails from people reaching out for help. “Younger and younger people call and say, ‘I think I have a problem shopping.’ They give me this little scale comparing themselves to other people on the show.”

As for Kim, Thomas calls her one of the success stories of “Hoarders.” She “gets that it’s a slow, gradual process — she was one of those people where, as [the crew] was leaving, she really put the pieces together that small, daily actions have big results.”

Participants are also offered six months of after-care. And since the show, Kim has continued to make progress. “I’m much more aware of the right thing to do. Now I have a process where I do [the cleaning] routinely,” she says. Kim mentioned, perhaps a bit self-consciously, that the producers wouldn’t let her clear out the cans of Diet Coke that cluttered her living room tables before the shoot began, urging her not to tidy anything up before they arrived; now she’s a “big recycler.” Before the show, Kim says, her efforts to clean ended up feeling like “two steps forward, three steps back,” but she says her participation on the show gave her a new perspective about how to stay on top of the clutter.

“Hoarders” may have a rehabilitative effect on more than just its participants. After finishing the premiere, I turned off the TV and ejected the screener. I could have gone to bed, tired and with a hand cramped from writing notes, but I didn’t. I opened my hall closet, dirty clothes spilling everywhere, and made the trip down to the laundry room. I pulled a tuft of cat hair from a corner in the living room and tossed it in the garbage can. Tomorrow, I told myself, I’d clean the whole house. It was time.

This story has been corrected since publication.

Tess Lynch is a writer living in Los Angeles. She has contributed to The Awl, This Recording, and Urlesque. You can read more of her essays on her cluttered blog, Wipe Your Feet.

Barouh pleaded guilty in February, the latest in a string of convictions won by the Justice Department after UBS last year admitted orchestrating tax evasion among rich U.S. clients and paid a $780 million fine. UBS also separately agreed to turn over more than 4,450 names of wealthy Americans suspected of dodging taxes through secret UBS accounts.

Jordan noted that Barouh has sought psychiatric help for the Holocaust compulsion, which his attorney described as the desire to “hide and hoard” assets to guard against a potential repeat of the Nazi attempt to exterminate Jews during World War II. After Barouh’s family fled Austria, they settled in Bogota, Colombia, where Barouh was born.

“He and his family might lose everything, exactly as his parents risked everything in the 1940s,” Jordan said in explaining the fear.

“I have lived under the weight of the Holocaust,” Barouh told the judge. “Those fears are finally starting to subside.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Neiman said criminal defendants invariably come up with some justification for their illegal actions — and that Barouh’s Holocaust trauma is no excuse.

“It does not give this defendant a license to break the law,” Neiman said. “Tax fraud is tax fraud.”

Barouh, of Golden Beach, founded the luxury brand Michele Watches, which he sold to Fossil Inc. for $50 million in 2004. But court documents show his effort to evade U.S. taxes started much earlier, in 1976, when he began skimming money from his company and stashing it in accounts in Hong Kong, the British Virgin Islands, Switzerland and Panama.

Eventually, Barouh turned to UBS, where he had as much as $10 million in accounts not declared with the IRS as required. Neiman estimated the total tax loss to the U.S. at over $736,000 from 2002 to 2007, the period covered by the U.S. investigation. Barouh pleaded guilty to a charge of filing a false 2007 tax return.

Although he faced up to 2 1/2 years in prison, prosecutors sought a reduction because he has provided extensive information about two Swiss money managers and one Swiss attorney. Neither was identified in court.

“The information he’s provided, we are using,” Neiman said. “It is ongoing.”

The 10-month sentence was half what prosecutors originally sought, but more than the one-year home detention Barouh requested. He also has paid more than $5 million in penalties for not reporting his overseas accounts and still owes back taxes, interest and penalties to the IRS, said his attorney, Robert Panoff. Barouh is scheduled to report to prison June 25.

But then this past Christmas at my mom’s house in North Carolina, I struggled for weeks to sift through my father’s old things, photographs of dozens of girlfriends I’ve never even met, old driver’s licenses documenting the onset of middle age in his face, boxes of history books about the spread of Nazism mixed in with new age tomes about the flowering of self-love, reflecting his attempts to balance an interest in conquest and conflict with a desire for enlightenment. Fine to get rid of your own stuff, but how do you say goodbye to someone else’s things without losing a piece of that person forever?

Shortly after trying (and mostly failing) to throw out some of my dad’s old stuff, I began hoarding TV shows about hoarders and hoarding. There’s something creepily cathartic about watching the extreme attachment some people have to their stuff. Each time I tune in for A&E’s “Hoarders” and TLC’s “Hoarding: Buried Alive,” it sends me into a cleaning frenzy, rifling through my closets and driving big bags of old stuff to Goodwill. But what else can you do when the camera pans over a house filled with boxes and stacks and piles of useless stuff, clothes and papers and old dishes and stuffed animals and costume jewelry, all of it clogging up the hallways and rooms and kitchens until dust starts to accumulate and bad smells rise up from the junk and communities of flies and parasites and bed bugs move in, keeping adult children from ever visiting their parents and forcing one family with small children into a tent in the backyard?

Despite my own hoarding impulses and my reluctance to get rid of my father’s things, my immediate response to this madness — the mountain of stuff that’s ruining these people’s lives, separating them from each other, complicating simple day-to-day activities, requiring constant hurdling and reshuffling and restacking — is to scream at the TV screen, “For God’s sake, light a match and say goodbye to all of it! Go away for a weekend and hire someone to drag it away! Just get rid of it!”

But soon it becomes obvious that all of that stuff is a reflection of some great loss — a husband who fell ill with heart cancer and died while awaiting a heart transplant, a fiancé who committed suicide unexpectedly, a lover who died in a car accident – then the difficulty of simply throwing it all out becomes clear. Instead of mourning the loss fully, the hoarder puts off saying goodbye.

And once the dead person’s things don’t leave the house, neither does anything else. The hoarder is stuck in a holding pattern. Perversely, though, new purchases are made to get the hoarder focused on new possibilities, each new thing representing a new escape fantasy: “We’ll bake cookies together, me and the girls, and life will be the way it was.” “We’ll set up lounge chairs by the pool, and a table, and friends will come by and relax, just as Tom and I always planned we’d do when we retired.” “I’ll finish knitting this skirt.” “I’ll read this magazine article about cake decorating.” “I’ll learn more about Sudoku.” The piles of stuff reflect a past that’s lost and gone forever, but also hint at a hazy, imagined future that is constructed more from fantasy than from a practical sense of what’s possible.

What’s missing, for the hoarder, is the present. The present is a house packed with oozing piles of crap. The present is nothing but failure and shame and self-doubt and learned helplessness.

“Living in my apartment with so many things is really depressing, because lots of things I have have memories to them,” admits Anne Thomas on “Hoarding: Buried Alive” of her place in New York City. “It’s almost like something that weighs me down so that I can’t move. I literally end up sitting there, pretty much paralyzed.”

“I just think I died right along with Tom,” says Janet on “Hoarders.” Her husband of 32 years died two years earlier.

“I would survive much better if the house just burned down,” Christina tells the “Hoarders” cameras, but she gets a little belligerent when anyone tries to mess with her stuff. “Things have been taken away from me in my life that I didn’t want taken away,” she says. Same here, but I still take out my trash, I feel like telling her. Still, Christina has my empathy until she won’t let her poor teenage daughter throw out any clothes that don’t fit her anymore. Christina insists that she needs to sort through all of it first.

Of course, Christina’s resistance only gets worse when the professional organizer and the psychologist and the army of junk-removers driving big trucks converge on her house. Instead of remembering how much better it would be if her “house just burned down,” she starts sorting through bags of trash, item by item, while everyone stands around and waits. It’s this part of hoarding shows, when the hoarder in question sighs and wrings her hands and insists that she really does need that old magazine or this little girl’s sweater or that box of knitting needles or this bag of 20-year-old shoes, that fills me with such palpable dread. Suddenly I think of the storage bin filled with old size-4 pants under my bed (who am I kidding?), among the dust bunnies. Suddenly I consider all of the sweaters I’ll probably never wear again and the books I’ll probably never read and the boots I haven’t worn since I was 27 and the old rings in my jewelry box that I never liked in the first place.

At this point I inevitably turn off the TV and start rifling through my things, filling up bags with junk that I’ve held onto because I was feeling sentimental or because it seemed wasteful to give it away when I might need it someday, or my daughter might use it, or I might find some other hoarder to take it off my hands.

Thanks to hoarding shows, I’ve sloughed off stuff that I’ve been moving from one residence to another for well over a decade: SyQuest cartridges and old mix tapes and skirts that never fit right and old suitcases I don’t use anymore. How could it have taken so long to get rid of such worthless junk? I haven’t been accumulating that much new stuff, really, I’ve just been putting off making a final decision on the stuff that I’d mindlessly packed and unpacked and reshuffled for years without just saying: I don’t need this, and I will never need this.

For me, guilt is a huge part of the equation. Somehow, throwing something away, even giving it to Goodwill, means that I’m being wasteful. What, you’re too good for these old shoes (that you bought when you were 22 and still dressed like Blossom)? What, you can’t keep wearing this perfectly good sweater (which is an ugly color, is missing several buttons, and doesn’t fit you anymore)? Hoarding also seems to be a generational thing: If you have working-class or middle-class parents or grandparents who survived the Depression, it’s tough to feel comfortable just giving stuff away, even if someone else might end up using it. My grandmother saved everything — yogurt containers, rubber bands, metal juice bottle tops. She had bags and bags of plastic tubs and old magazines stuffing every room of her house, all of it destined for some craft project that was never to be. Eventually, I started to recognize the pangs of regret I got when I put things in bags to be given away. I would picture my mom or grandmother, shaking their heads. Giving away perfectly good stuff meant I was some kind of soulless yuppie.

The green movement and the digital age may have helped to reroute our thinking about possessions. As long as reusing and recycling include passing stuff along to other people who might want it more, as long as there’s not much of a need for big boxes of photographs or old VCR tapes or walls filled with CDs, since all of these things can be reduced to a hard drive the size of your wallet, then maybe our environments can finally be uncluttered and unburdened by unnecessary bullshit.

Then again, our inability to get rid of certain things is sometimes tied to our hesitation to give up on some idea of ourselves: “I might still be a size 4 someday,” says the 40-year-old size-8 mother. “I might still train for a marathon following this program in this 1998 issue of Runners’ World Magazine, I might still learn something from my old philosophy books from college, I might still break out my old acrylic paints and read all of these back issues of the New Yorker.” We all want to feel that our lives are filled with endless possibilities, that we have all the time in the world. Hoarding can be a way of denying that there’s an end point to your timeline or boundaries around your opportunities.

But when I watch these hoarders, kvetching over this bag of yarn or that muffin tin, I think about the old black-and-white photographs you sometimes find at flea markets and estate sales, photos of a couple smiling on their couch, or of a gathering of women in a backyard, holding a miserable-looking baby, or of a girl sitting on a swing, a dog wandering through the grass nearby. These are someone else’s memories that were packed away in boxes, in an attic or a basement, and when that person died, no one wanted them. No kids, no sisters, no spouse, no second cousins showed up and dragged these photographs away — they were left in a pile somewhere, and now here they are, being sorted through by total strangers. How much stuff will I force my kids to sort through? How much of it will immediately be identified as worthless? How much of my stuff might end up like this, drifting through the hands of strangers? When you think about your stuff that way, 90 percent of it suddenly begs to be boxed up and driven to Goodwill immediately.

My mother, for one, doesn’t want any more stuff, ever. She calls to remind us not to get her presents for her birthday or for Christmas, and she’s actively trying to kill all of her houseplants. The thought of an empty closet, an empty attic, a house with nothing but a few comfortable chairs, a handful of books and one or two of her very favorite things, fills her heart with joy. A life with less stuff is a peaceful, unencumbered life, as far as she is concerned.

This summer when I’m home, I’ll help my mom by finally sorting through the last of my dad’s things and getting rid of everything but one small box, which I’ll take home with me, to put in one of my (now much emptier) closets. I’ll probably keep the drivers’ licenses with my dad’s weird self-conscious expressions, and some of the old coins, and a few angry letters he wrote, to colleagues and to the local newspaper. It’s just stuff, I know, but it still feels important to me.

It’s sort of a weird all or nothing thinking that I can’t break away from. I’ve done this sort of thing now for the past 15 years and I can’t seem to stop or change much. For instance, it extends from cases like the following — a friend calls me, I forget to call them back immediately, the gap widens and widens, but yet the longer I leave it, the more embarrassed I am to call them back, until this friend thinks I’m mad at them and they don’t know why, but still I can’t acknowledge them. It’s as though I feel that I’m not deserving as a friend or something. And thus the friendship ends. Nowadays I do the exact same thing with e-mail. In fact, people will send me second and third e-mails, and I’ll be so certain that these people must be mad at me, that I don’t even read their notes, I just ignore them. Until the friendship ends.

Or the following — right now, my apartment is an unbelievable mess. I can’t bring myself to do laundry, dishes, regular chores. I work a lot, so I’m very busy. But the fact that I can’t even do my dishes means that I’m a total loser who should just go to bed and hide from the world because I can’t even manage a simple thing like dishes.

Or the following — at work right now, I’m working on a project that, unless I take control of it right away, is headed for total disaster. I know it is, I know what I could do to save it. But I’m unable to act in the way I need to.

It’s almost like I have a split personality in some ways. Some of my relationships and friendships are just fine. I hold down jobs, I get things done. Until something goes wrong like this, then they are in danger of falling into this zone. And some people have this perception of me as being highly organized and efficient, because they have never seen this side of me. But when I’ve written something off in this way, I push the problem so far off my radar that I forget about it, or it ceases to be a problem. For instance, my last apartment — I got to hate it so much I stopped cleaning my kitchen. Finally I just moved. This sounds ridiculous (and it wasn’t quite that extreme, but close), but it’s pretty close to accurate.

I really want to change, but I don’t know what to do. And the stress that my inaction causes me is unbelievable and makes everything seem even more insurmountable. The fact that I logically know what’s going on only makes this more torturous. If I lived in ignorant bliss of my dysfunction I could understand why I’m unable to make any significant changes.

I’m a decent person, I mean the world no harm. Why can’t I get my life together?

All or Nothing

Dear All Or Nothing,

Your problem is really, really interesting, and sort of classic. I mean, you are the paralyzed man in denial. I definitely relate. I too have been the paralyzed man in denial. So what can I do to help? I certainly cannot cure you. There are people who can, though, I think. In fact, the thing to do is present yourself to the Psychological Establishment, Behavioral Branch — Cognitive Therapy Division. Offer yourself up as a subject; trust them to fix you. I think they probably can, if you’re willing to do some work.

What else can I do? Not much, I’m afraid, except urge you, browbeat you, serenade you, whatever it takes to get you to avail yourself of help. The technology is available is what I’m saying.

But the main thing is getting around to it, right? If you’re like me, just reading about the possibility that one day if you really wanted to you could actually take some concrete steps to fix the problem sort of makes you feel better for a while so you can forget about actually doing anything for, like, 20 years or so at which point you’re still like, Gee, it’s great to know there are behavioral psych techniques that can fix me, so one day when things get really bad I’ll get around to checking out some of that therapy. By which time you can’t get out your front door because there are three pianos and the engine from a Model T Ford in the hallway of your modest-size Brooklyn flat. Because what started as mild avoidance behavior has now evolved into some full-blown mania of avoidance and hoarding of musical instruments and internal combustion engines.

So you want to take advantage of behavioral therapy while you can still get out your door.

Would it help to tell a personal anecdote?

OK. It was my first job. I was the chief of the mailroom. It was my job to pay the bills and answer inquiries about why certain bills had not been paid, and to reconcile creditors’ claims of what we owed them with our claims of what we had paid and make appropriate noises of protest or accommodation.

The fact that after grad school in creative writing my first job was in the mailroom of a manufacturer of telephone equipment says something about my lack of good sense and direction. But I did not want to join the creative writing establishment and become another pallid aesthete on the dole; I wanted real-world experience!

My first job-related insight: Wow, man, work is hella tiring! Maybe this is why more people don’t read Proust!

Work was so tiring, in fact, and my outside activities took place at such a late hour and in such euphoric conditions that even with my meager job duties I was before long utterly overwhelmed. I went into that zone you talk about. I put a big cardboard box under my desk and any piece of mail that I could not deal with went into the box.

After a few months the box was full. Then I resigned.

Then they found the box. They wanted to know Wha? They were all big-mouthed Wha? And I was like Dunno. Really. Just couldn’t, you know, deal with it.

You know? You know, I’m sure of it.

So what eventually happened? In my case, I did not seek therapy for that particular behavioral problem. I went on to scale much greater heights of denial and procrastination until, well, familiar story, the booze did me in. Behavioral adjustment came much, much later, after the basic life on life’s terms crap, and all the Oh hell, I really did act like a complete schmuck and here is your money back and the records I took and all the books of yours that I sold for drug money I’ll try to find them for you though many remain out of print and just generally hard to find so you may be just shit out of luck, in addition to all the millions of generic yet heartfelt I’m really really sorrys …

Nothing new there. All these fears and methods of avoidance do tend to work together somehow and, yes, drinking is indeed one of many ways to deal with what you don’t want to deal with. So if you have other such behavioral tics as that, well, all the more reason to get a crew of head mechanics to scour your undercarriage for signs of excessive wear. Get yourself looked at is what I’m saying. They have good medicine for this. There are people out there who can fix it.

And let me know how it turns out — when you can get around to it.

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What? You want more?