Compulsive spending often debilitating

The holiday shopping season can bring out the worst in people. Crowded stores, empty shelves, pressing deadlines, and endless check-out lines quickly lead to irritation and stress. Yet, for the two-eight percent of the U.S. population estimated to have a problem with compulsive buying, setting out to purchase a gift can trigger a complex series of behaviors and reactions that are psychologically--and even physically--debilitating.

"It's not uncommon to see piles of items, decades old, still wrapped, that were intended as gifts but never given away," says Randy Frost, professor of psychology at Smith College, Northampton, Mass. Situations that are hard for compulsive shoppers, he indicates, include sales, discounts, two-for-one incentives, and cable television shopping programs. "Compulsive shoppers struggle particularly when confronted with items that they know to be good bargains."

Little is known about compulsive shopping except that it is more common in women than men, is correlated with anxiety and depression, and runs the gamut of income levels. Some researchers have suggested it may be related to obsessive-compulsive disorders, such as uncontrollable acquisition and hoarding; others have posited a link to impulse-control problems like kleptomania.

Ordinary holiday shopping, while typically concentrated concentrated and time-consuming, is not the same as compulsive buying, Frost emphasizes, unless it manifests some of the disorder's key diagnostic qualities. Compulsive shopping is "excessive, uncontrollable, time-consuming, and repetitive and causes marked emotional distress and financial difficulty."

Although research typically has focused on the economic effects of excessive purchasing, Frost and others maintain this is not the only outcome. Compulsive shoppers may find themselves, over time, isolated, estranged from family and friends, and fearful of social situations. "In a consumer society such as ours," Frost concludes, "an inability to resist purchasing messages can have serious and devastating effects."

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