Buying trouble

J.P. says 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," says J.P. "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 last 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, says 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.

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Nature of an addiction

We all shop. In that simple fact, say experts, 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," says Dr. Eric Hollander, chairman of psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. But a small percentage of consumers, he says, seem to suffer from "a profound deficit" in the ability to resist their impulse to shop, in spite of negative consequences. For those people, says Hollander, the term disorder "seems to fit."

True addiction of this sort doesn't rise and fall with economic cycles, says Dr. Lorrin Koran, a professor of psychiatry (emeritus) 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 says.