Compulsive Spending: Both Sexes Buying

Oct. 2, 2006 -- Forget the gender stereotypes about compulsive buying. Men do it, too.

That's what researchers including Lorrin Koran, MD, report in The American Journal of Psychiatry.

Koran works in the psychiatry department at Stanford University's medical school in California.

Compulsive buying has mainly been studied in women, Koran's team notes. But if their findings are correct, compulsive buying is just as common among men.

Compulsive buying isn't in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders -- Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), the handbook of psychiatric disorders.

But Koran and others have suggested that it should be.

"Compulsive buying leads to serious psychological, financial, and family problems including depressiondepression, overwhelming debt, and the breakup of relationships," Koran says in a Stanford news release.

"People don't realize the extent of the damage it does to the sufferer," he adds.

Urge to Buy

The researchers polled 2,513 U.S. adults by telephone in the spring and summer of 2004.

Poll topics included out-of-control shopping, overwhelming impulses to buy, needless purchases, credit card use, and debt.

About 6% of women and men qualified as compulsive buyers, based on a scale designed to separate compulsive shoppers from everyone else.

Estimates from other studies have ranged from about 2% to 16%, the researchers note.

Here are some of the traits that the researchers note for the compulsive shoppers:

• They took greater pleasure in shopping and buying.
• They more often made "senseless and impulsive purchases."
• They more often felt depressed after shopping.
• They more often experienced uncontrollable buying binges.