PSYCHIATRY Shopping to buy a better mood

Compulsive shoppers often have low self-esteem and depression.
By KAREN PATTERSON
DALLAS MORNING NEWS
SAN FRANCISCO -- She shops alone.
She buys clothing, probably. Or shoes, or makeup. Jewelry, maybe, or other items.
Often it's nothing too expensive, but the compulsive shopper buys lots of it -- perhaps many of the same item.
The buying leads to lying. Family conflict. Social and workplace difficulties. Legal trouble. And, of course, money problems.
As part of a national meeting in San Francisco last month, psychiatrists gathered to better understand and treat people who buy compulsively. Studies have variously estimated that between 2 percent and 8 percent, or even as many as 16 percent, of people in the United States are prone to shop compulsively. Most of them are women.
"By the way, they generally don't come to psychiatrists," Dr. Donald Black of the University of Iowa told his colleagues. "They don't view this as a psychiatric problem."
Yet compulsive buyers tend to have low self-esteem and high levels of depression and anxiety, said researcher Ronald Faber of the University of Minnesota.
Root of the problem
Experts have considered whether compulsive buying is a problem like drug or alcohol addiction, or is related to obsessive-compulsive disorder. But Dr. Black and many others think the behavior is instead related to impulse control. "It's enjoyable; it's pleasurable, not like, say, OCD, which is unwanted," he said in San Francisco at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association.
The problem lies with self-regulation, Faber said -- the effort to control or modify the self to change unwanted behaviors. Everyone struggles with this now and then.
In his research on compulsive buyers, Faber has found that emotions are influential. When asked to complete this sentence -- "I am most likely to buy myself something when ..." -- typical consumers said things like "I want something" or "I feel like I have extra money." And about 20 percent gave a response involving an emotion, usually a positive one.
However, rather than give a single response, Faber said, "compulsive buyers gave us run-on sentences, four or five different things when finishing the sentence." Some 43 percent mentioned a negative emotion as the first response, and about 30 percent did as a later response.
Negative moods
Compulsive buyers are more prone toward feeling angry, hurt, bored, irritated, depressed, stressed and even fat, Faber said.
In one study, only about a quarter of typical shoppers said their mood improved after buying, yet all but one of 24 compulsive buyers said their mood changed. And about 85 percent said it improved, Faber found.
So regulating mood trumps regulating the self, Faber suggested. "We will control negative feelings [first]. We'll work on trying to make them better rather than not buy," he said, adding that this suggests a need to control negative moods to rein in compulsive buying.