Shopaholics Get Recognition at Last

Shop til you drop? Compulsive buying is estimated to affect between 1.8% and 16% of adult Americans. The wide variation in these numbers suggests we don’t have a good definition of the problem. But a new large study conducted by Stanford scientists, reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry, have used a validated screening test, called the Compulsive Buying Scale, to classify over 2500 adults as compulsive buyers or not. They found that 6% of the women and 5.5% of the men were compulsive buyers, or shopaholics. Compared with other participants, the shopaholics were younger and had an annual income below $50,000. They were also four times less likely to pay off credit card balances in full!

The study results have stirred some psychiatrists to consider whether compulsive buying is really compulsive, and if it’s a real psychiatric disorder. There’s a risk that declaring it as a real medical disorder might open the doors to ’medicalization’ and thereby invent a reason to sell more drugs. But that sort of consideration hasn’t stopped psychiatrists making diagnoses of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or social anxiety disorder, which are now widely accepted as common treatable diseases, and listed in the widely-used Diagnosis and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. So we may expect some action on this in the future. Which should please the spouses of shopaholics who are trying to balance the family checkbook.