When shopping fails as therapy

For most of us, holiday sales and ad blitzes are so much window dressing. Lights, Sinatra music, gadgets in mall windows, catalogs of beautiful people in beautiful sweaters -- all very nice, and usually worth an impulse buy, or two, maybe more.

But for a small number of adults, the season of buying and giving yields a harvest of heavy debt -- the kind that means you can’t pay your utility bills or threatens a marriage -- and closets full of clothes, books, electronics and other products, some with the tags still attached.

“I had a friend say that she knew what it was like, she had to go to six different stores to buy one thing,” said Ada Spade, 52, of Cupertino, Calif., who at one time had enough arts and crafts supplies piled up in her house to start a store. “Well, she has no idea. If I’d been in six stores, I’d have at least six things, one from each store. At least.”

Compulsive shopping is not a widely recognized medical diagnosis and hardly merits being called a disorder, because researchers are only beginning to study it. But psychiatrists say it’s a real problem for people who shop several or more times a week, bringing home things they don’t need and rarely use.

Like compulsive gambling or shoplifting, researchers say, the buying seems to soothe low-level depression, anger or unease, giving the person a sense of excitement and control, without breaking any rules. It’s shopping therapy, taken to an extreme.

Because the holidays provide a license to buy, they also offer an opportunity to identify the problem in yourself or a family member. One way to know you’ve “hit bottom,” compulsive shoppers say, is when the just-bought goodies in the closet far outnumber those under the tree or wrapped up and given away.

Counselors at Debtors Anonymous, which holds weekly meetings in cities across the country, say their groups swell this time of year with habitual shoppers, and often more so in January and February when the bills roll in.

“First off, most of what these shoppers buy for themselves they don’t use; they totally lose interest once they’ve bought it,” said Dr. Lorrin Koran, a psychiatrist at Stanford University who studies impulse control problems. “It’s the act of buying itself that brings pleasure.”

In the early 1990s, a University of Minnesota professor interested in consumer behavior mailed questionnaires to about 800 adults, selected at random, in Illinois, seeking responses to statements such as “I feel anxious on days when I don’t shop,” and inquiring about time spent thinking about shopping. Of the some 300 people who responded, 1% to 2% had a shopping compulsion, the survey suggested.

According to Dr. Donald Black, a psychiatrist at the University of Iowa, 80% to 95% of those affected are women. The habit usually takes hold in their late teens or early 20s and usually is chronic.

Its consequences are measured in dollars: The typical U.S. household carries about $8,000 in credit card debt, according to U.S. Census figures; habitual shoppers typically carry $10,000, often more, experts say. In some cases, the problem is hardly a secret. A man treated in one study had 2,000 wrenches; a woman in another filled an empty bedroom with unused clothes.

In one of the few attempts to directly compare the buying behavior of problem shoppers with that of more typical shoppers, researchers in Paris found several differences: Compulsive shoppers tended to associate purchases with social status, were less likely to use what they bought and were more likely to consider their purchases as “occasions not to be missed.”

Advertisers understand this, of course; products are said to be in “limited supply” and sales are “for a limited time only.” Yet it takes a habitual shopper to turn this manufactured urgency into a way of life. “There were some stores, I knew everything they had in stock, everything,” said Spade, who controlled her habit with counseling and medication. “I’d still go in all the time, to see what was new, to make sure I wasn’t missing something. Every day was a treasure hunt.”

Like others with a persistent shopping urge, Spade bought things not only for show, but also to improve herself and her skills. She makes quilts and clothes, and still has fabric for about 400 shirts, stockpiled from her buying days three years ago. “I had no time to pursue my hobbies, because, of course, I was too busy shopping,” she said.

Self-awareness alone may help control the habit. In some cases, psychologists have found that asking a shopper to keep a diary of purchases can slow the person’s spending. Identifying thoughts or moods or people who may trigger a mall run also can help -- by knowing the bait, a shopper can avoid the trap at least some of the time.

Along with talk therapy, several researchers have been experimenting with drugs to address underlying mood problems, when they’re evident. In a Stanford University study published in August in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 11 of 15 compulsive shoppers who began to control their habit by taking the antidepressant citalopram were managing well up to a year later. Others have reported improvement with naltrexone, which reduces cravings in some habitual drinkers. “It is treatable; people should know that,” Koran said.