Alison Hammond stepped in when A Place in the Sun actress Jasmine Harman wept about her mother’s hoarding.
The TV host, 47, told Alison, 48, and Dermot O’Leary on Wednesday’s This Morning that she was’really ashamed’ about her mother Vasoulla’s mental health issue.
The Bake Off presenter sprang up to comfort Jasmine and offer her tissues when she burst into tears and struggled to complete her statement.
Jasmine began by revealing that as a youngster, she’refused’ to bring friends and lovers home because she was’really humiliated and ashamed’ of the mess, before breaking down in tears.
Jasmine fought back tears as she pondered on the lessons she had learnt from living with her mother’s disease, saying she now focuses on having a ‘loving connection’ with her mother.
Breaking down, Jasmine struggled to finish the sentence before continuing: ‘And not focusing on the hoarding.’
Jasmine added while crying: ‘I’m so grateful to have her. Sorry.’
Alison immediately got up to get a tissue for the tearful presenter and comforted her as she spoke up more about Vasoulla’s hoarding.
Dabbing her tears away, Jasmine continued: ‘She has helped me to become a much more compassionate person. We used to fight. We used to argue about it all the time. But now we have a relationship outside that’s not focused on the hoarding.’
Jasmine had previously told the ITV hosts her ‘biggest fear’ when she began her TV career was that ‘someone would find out about the way I’d grown up and how I’d lived at that time.’
Her experiences inspired her to front 2011 documentary My Hoarder Mum And Me and follow up Britain’s Biggest Hoarders, both of which she described as ‘really cathartic.’
Jasmine stated that after the episodes aired, she was approached by numerous others who were similarly impacted by hoarding, prompting her to create an online network with tools.
According to the NHS, a hoarding condition occurs when a person accumulates an excessive quantity of goods and keeps them in an unorganised way, resulting in unmanageable levels of clutter.
The primary treatment is cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which will assist the client in understanding what makes it difficult to throw things away and why the clutter has accumulated.
This Morning airs weekdays from 10am on ITV.
