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Like other addictions, shopping can take over a life
BY MELISSA HEALY Los Angeles Times

    In a land where people are implored to shop as an expression of patriotism, where little girls can attend summer camp cruising the stores of a mall, and where the average credit-card holder is $1,673 behind in payments, buying things in the United States is more than a hunt for daily provisions. It’s a national pastime, a form of therapy, a means of self-expression.
    But for more than 1 in 20 Americans, shopping is something darker. A study published in the October 2006 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry found that at some point in the lives of an estimated 5.8 percent of the U.S. population, shopping will become a source of shame, a cry for help, the cause of job losses and broken relationships, a road to financial ruin. They are “compulsive buyers” — troubled by intrusive impulses to shop, prone to lose track of time while doing so, plagued by post-purchase remorse, guilt and financial woes, and sometimes given up on by loved ones.
    As the drumbeat of depressing economic indicators accelerates, they are a group coming out of the closet.
    “I get several calls a month from people who say, ‘I don’t know what you call it, but this is out of control,’ ” said psychiatrist Timothy Fong, director of the Impulse Control Disorders Clinic at the University of California, Los Angeles, and codirector of the university’s Addiction Medicine Clinic. For the truly addicted shopper, Fong said, “it’s not lack of willpower” that makes them unable to stop shopping. “It’s an inability to control impulses and desires and behaviors.”
TRIGGERING AN IMPULSE
    Mental health professionals are actively debating how to label and treat these consumers’ problematic behavior. As they do so, clinics, selfhelp groups and therapists specializing in the care and rehabilitation of compulsive shoppers are popping up across the country like so many specialized boutiques. They have found no shortage of clients.
    J.P., a 66-year-old Los Angeles man, is one of them. For six years a member of the 12-step group Debtors Anonymous (and so, following its rules, he’s declined to identify himself by name), J.P. calls himself a constantly struggling compulsive shopper and a binge person by nature. Echoing the observations of many compulsive shoppers and those who treat them, J.P. said that what seems to trigger his impulse to spring for something is “a feeling of needing to fix yourself . . . a sense of filling a void.”
    J.P. said that buying something — in his case, costly services such as workshops and courses — would make him exuberant, give him a shot of energy and a sense of purpose. But the crash, which could come hours, days or weeks later when he realized he had succumbed to a costly impulse, has always been hard. “I feel suckered. I feel incompetent in a way that I didn’t feel before.
    “It is an addiction,” J.P. said. “It becomes an addiction because it feels the more you do this thing, the better you’re going to be. It’s completely wrongheaded, wrong thinking.”
    Programs designed to address such wrong thinking are growing more numerous and better-attended. In the past five years, Stanford University and UCLA have established treatment programs for those who report out-of-control shopping. A New York City therapist, after running group programs for three years from her office, is set to launch an at-home program for those who overshop.
    Debtors Anonymous, meanwhile, has seen an uptick of attendance at its meetings in recent years — a measure, said Jan S., a trustee of the organization, both of hard economic times and people’s inability to curb their spending habits accordingly. By far, most of the organization’s 400 meetings in the U.S. are held in chapters in and around Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco.
    We all shop. In that simple fact, experts say, lies the difficulty of distinguishing the avid shopper, or even the occasionally excessive shopper, from the shopper who is out of control. “You don’t want to medicalize normal behavior,” said Dr. Eric Hollander, chairman of psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. But a small percentage of consumers, he said, seem to suffer from a profound deficit in the ability to resist their impulse to shop, despite negative consequences. For those people, Hollander said, the term disorder seems to fi t.
FUNCTIONAL IMPAIRMENT
    True addiction of this sort doesn’t rise and fall with economic cycles, said Dr. Lorrin Koran, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at Stanford, who wrote the 2006 study gauging the prevalence of problem shoppers in the United States. In good times and in bad, compulsive shoppers shop compulsively.
    But in boom times, these shoppers’ passion for purchasing can be dismissed as a pricey hobby or hidden like so many unopened shopping bags in a closet. In times of economic downturn, mortgage woes and growing job insecurity, an uncontrolled yen for shopping becomes an addiction that few can afford to deny. “In hard times, people’s money may be tighter. So it might cause functional impairment at an earlier stage,” Hollander said.
    In fact, for a true compulsive buyer, rising food costs and gas prices, possible layoffs and a hike in mortgage rates might even trigger a perverse reaction: Stressed by financial difficulties, many problem consumers will escape their worries with a trip to the store, a browse on a favorite shopping site or an impulse call to a shopping channel.
    Whether it’s the growing number of treatment programs springing up or the worsening economy, the number of people coming forward for help appears to be growing. April Lane Benson, a New York psychologist who has pioneered a telephone-based form of group therapy for compulsive shoppers, reports: “There’s more and more traffic to my Web site, I’m getting more and more requests. I have to imagine that’s in part due to the economic times.”
    If those seeking treatment are any gauge, compulsive shopping is an overwhelmingly female condition. Some 80 percent of those who come forward, experts say, are women. Koran said there’s every reason to believe that men are just as likely to buy compulsively. But men don’t come for help.
    Since 2005, New York therapist Benson, author of the book “I Shop, Therefore I Am,” has had participants in her group psychotherapy sessions keep journals and shopping lists that track their moods, their impulses and their household needs. When contemplating a purchase, Benson’s patients are asked to record their answers to questions such as these: Why am I here? How do I feel? Do I need this? What if I wait? How will I pay for it? Where will I put it?
    For most compulsive buyers, Benson says she believes that losing control is a chronic vulnerability. But with rigorous self-examination, she said it’s not as hard as people think to break the spell that shopping seems to cast. “People have to understand what their triggers are, what the emotional aftermath is, what happens after the bill comes. And they have to think about what their values are and their vision in life.”     

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Dear Annie: I read the letter from “Gift Horse,” whose mother buys her presents she doesn’t need instead of what she could use.
    We are a young couple with two young children and could use a little help. My mother, who lives paycheck to paycheck with no savings and bad credit, still feels the need to buy every single toy she sees. She gives gifts we don’t need and knows we don’t want. She does this to everyone in the family. She also compulsively buys tons of stuff for herself, like DVDs and cosmetics. I could pretend to appreciate this junk, but Mom is practically destitute.
    We’ve told her to save her money, but she won’t listen and gets upset when I insinuate that I don’t want to feed and house her when she’s out on the street someday. How can we make her understand? — Over-Gifted Daughter

    Dear Daughter: Your mother has an obsessive-compulsive disorder, and unless she is willing to address it, there isn’t much you can do. If she buys you anything that you can return, do so, and put the refund in a bank account that can be used to help support her if she becomes indigent.

who would want to 'take care' of all that crap.....ya, gotta wash it, move it, store it etc.......when we are dead it all goes to the landfill and we are never remembered again......it's all mostly just crap.......