Posted on 11/01/2003 11:32:52 AM PST by wheelgunguru
Shopaholism: Human weakness or mental disease? Experts say over-consumption is on the rise.
NEW YORK (Money magazine) - Marie LaTortue loves shopping the way Michael Jackson loves plastic surgery: truly, madly, deeply.
Every few months, Marie goes on a binge, hitting the malls in a state of giddy determination, dropping hundreds of bucks on clothes and shoes she knows she'll never wear. "The adrenaline just starts pumping," the Fort Lauderdale hairdresser says. "When I see a blouse I like, I have to get every single color. I just have to."
The two dozen bags of clothes in her bedroom (most with tags still on them), the 139 pairs of never-worn shoes in her closet -- these are just the side effects of her not-so-magnificent obsession. The 30-year-old wears the same few outfits to work so her colleagues won't realize how much is hidden away at home. "I really think it's a sickness," she says, laughing occasionally as she tells me all this, but she's really not kidding.
Marie scares me a little. Not because what she's saying sounds alien to me, but because I can see a bit of myself in her.
No, I don't cruise the malls in search of designer duds. I wouldn't know where to put them: My apartment is spilling over with stuff accumulated over many years of "bargain" hunting: hundreds of books I've never opened (except to write my name inside); stacks of CDs I've played but once; a vast assortment of paint-by-numbers landscapes that seemed so wonderfully kitschy when I found them on eBay.
So far, the financial damage from my little binges has been minimal. But if my tastes were a bit more expensive, or my buyer's remorse a tad less intense, I'd be in real trouble.
So when I ran across a news story on a psychiatrist at Stanford who was successfully treating compulsive shoppers with the antidepressant Celexa, I knew I needed to find out more. Not just because it was a good story but because I needed to know if I was in danger of becoming one of them myself.
I spoke with a small army of experts and self-admitted compulsive shoppers across the country. They soon dispelled any lingering notion that shopaholism is a make-believe disorder afflicting only bored housewives and "Sex and the City" types.
The addicts I spoke with conformed to stereotype in one respect: Almost all were women. (Experts say that 90 percent of all compulsive shoppers are women.)
Otherwise, they were a diverse bunch -- white, black, Latina; some in their fifties, some in their teens; some married, some single; some earning good money, others scraping by. Many had accumulated tens of thousands of dollars in debt to feed a habit that troubled and bewildered them.
When Marie tells me she sees her shopping addiction as a "sickness," she's closer to the mark than she may realize. Many researchers are coming to believe that compulsive shopping is a mental disorder as real, and often as devastating, as drug addiction or pathological gambling.
While few of us will ever need to pop a pill to steer clear of the mall, the emerging body of research on shopping addiction can teach everyone something about the inner shopaholic in all of us.
Shopper Americanus
It's hard to imagine a disorder as quintessentially American as compulsive shopping. (In the wake of Sept. 11, President Bush famously urged consumers to keep spending -- and many credit that spending for preventing a double-dip recession at a time when most businesses are still sitting on their wallets.)
But it was a German -- psychologist Emil Kraepelin -- who first defined excessive shopping as an illness, calling it "oniomania" after the Latin onos, or price. Kraepelin named the disorder nearly 90 years ago, but until recently, it has been only dimly understood.
As recently as a decade ago, University of Minnesota sociologist Ronald Faber recalls, "it was treated a lot like alcoholism was in the 1950s, seen as kind of a joke."
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
Add kitchen gadgets and you'll find Nirvana.
Stack them together and put a reading lamp on top and presto! An end table. All of your furniture can be replaced with books.
Heating bills too high? Just build bookcases against all outside walls. The books provide insulation. You can use them for dividers as well. Tear down all your inside walls and replace them with waist high double sided bookcases. Practical and charming.
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