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There are an estimated 2 million hoarders in America who are so unable to throw things out that their lives, jobs and families can be ruined. Their stories are featured in the TLC series, "Buried Alive." Cindy Carroll, seen here in red, is one of them.
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The four-bedroom house Cindy shares with her husband, Mike, in Westerville, Ohio, has 6-foot-high towers of what most people would call clutter.
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"The people that don't understand it. You really hurt us by telling us we're lazy. We're not," says Cindy Carroll. "It's hard to be a hoarder. It's a lot of hard work."
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Cindy says she is an "information hoarder," who cannot walk by a newsstand without buying magazines. She can't even throw away junk mail. Her email inbox is so full of messages most people would cringe to look at it.
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Cindy was always a little messy, but when the kids left for college, the mess morphed into a monster. Now, her son and daughter stay clear.
Daughter Lori, shown here, lives just down the street. Before the show, she had not set foot in her mother's house in two years.
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Cindy and her husband Mike have been together for 34 years. And they both love family. But Cindy's hoarding, diagnosed eight years ago, has pushed the family away.
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Cindy is seen here with her therapist, Dr. Fugen Neziroglu. Despite being in treatment, Cindy says it's still hard to resist hoarding things she doesn't need.
"When I go shopping I don't think about the hoarding," she says. "I think about how it's going to make my life better."
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"Hoarding is a potentially debilitating disorder where people accumulate more and more things in their home - clutter - to the point that they are no longer able to use their house for its intended purpose," Dr. Julie Pike, Ph.D., who specializes in the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorders, including hoarding, told CBS News. Pike practices at the Anxiety Disorders Treatment Center in Durham, N.C.
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Cindy loved being a mom, everything about it, from coaching the soccer team to leading the cub-scout pack. Now her own children won't step foot in the house.
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The Carrol's two daughters are fully grown and out of the house. But piles of their childhood remain strewn across the home.
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Cindy Carroll says she is in treatment for her hoarding and her life is improving.
"Trying to cook your dinner on a space this big and now my kitchen's clean. It's a hundred times, a thousand times easier to live my life," she tells CBS News.
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