Both Sexes Overshop
Oct. 1, 2006 — -- Outrageous bills are a familiar nightmare for many compulsive shoppers.
And, contrary to popular opinion, men suffer that nightmare nearly as often as women.
Men and women are almost equally likely to suffer compulsive buying disorder -- a condition marked by binge shopping sprees and financial debt -- according to a study in the latest issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.
"The widespread opinion that most compulsive buyers are women may be wrong," said the study's researchers.
A 2004 telephone survey of more than 2,500 American adults found that 6 percent of women and about 5.5 percent of men are compulsive shoppers.
That's more than 1 in 20 adults.
This survey is the first to find such a high number of compulsive shoppers in the general population. Before now, researchers had estimated between 2 and 16 percent of U.S. citizens were affected by compulsive buying disorder.
And researchers previously believed that 90 percent of sufferers were women, but this study indicates otherwise.
"Men suffer from compulsive buying disorder just as often as women do," said Dr. Eric Hollander, chairman of psychiatry at New York's Mount Sinai School of Medicine and author of an editorial related to the study.
"Men buy different things than women. Women tend to buy things for other people, while men buy expensive electronics," Hollander said.
The researchers discovered other interesting factoids about compulsive buyers.
Compared with other survey respondents, compulsive buyers are younger and more likely to report incomes under $50,000. Their credit cards are often within a few hundred dollars of the credit limit, and compulsive buyers are more than four times as likely as other respondents to make only the minimum payment on credit card balances.
Compulsive shopping disorder differs from impulse buying -- it drives people to go on regular shopping binges and buy unnecessary or unwanted things that almost always cost more than a person can afford.
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