From Health - September 1997
UNCOMMON THIEVES
What Makes Kleptomaniacs Steal?
by James Morgan
SANDRA PAUSES for the slightest second, her heart in her throat, before she catches her breath and steps on the mat that triggers open the doors to Wal-Mart. Stores make her nervous these days, and she tries her best to stay out of them.
"Makes me anxious," she says, voice quavering.
And then she plunges in, the doors whooshing shut behind her like the ocean
closing around a drowning woman. Everywhere she looks there are things-shiny,
glittery, sparkling, new. Sandra pulls a cart from the rack and begins to wade
deeper into the store. Almost imperceptibly she casts a glance at the ceiling,
taking silent measure of the smoky plastic security bubbles.
She steers the cart toward the aisles without them and stops a moment, long
enough to run her fingers across the vivid silky petals of the artificial flowers
on display. And then she moves on to another aisle, the one with barrettes.
Some are encrusted with bright faux jewels, others are made of sleek tortoiseshell.
There are barrettes in every color imaginable, a virtual rainbow of possibilities
for matching any outfit. She is enthralled.
Never mind that Sandra doesn't wear barrettes.
Sandra is 51, a mother of three, married for 29 years to a systems analyst in the automobile industry. The home they built among the pines some 45 miles west of Detroit looks like the good life incarnate. Town and country living, ample parking for many vehicles, a guest cottage out back.
But inside it's a different story. "Look at this," Sandra's husband, Tom, says, waving an arm at the boxes and boxes of ... of stuff, as he and Sandra call it, stacked against two walls of the dining room. "And wait until you see the basement." It is a big basement, designed by Tom with an eye toward indulging his passion for electric trains. But right now it looks like a mini Wal-Mart: boxes piled three or four high, filled with kitchen utensils, hardware, shoes, belts, shirts, pens, knickknacks.
All of these things aren't the bric-a-brac of the good life.
They're the spoils of an obsession. Sandra is a convicted shoplifter.
It's not, of course, that she needed to steal-at least, not in the monetary sense of the word. Sandra never even needed to work. Like traditional morns everywhere, she spent her days dealing with the logistics of daily life-carting her three kids to this place and that, meeting friends for lunch, planning meals, and being in charge of the house. Sandra seems so typical that if you saw her on the street, you'd think you knew her life story. But you'd be wrong.
Her compulsion had consumed her since the late sixties, though she hid it from everyone. Back then, when the children were little, Torn would come home from work to find them with the baby-sitter. When Sandra did show up she usually arrived with a carload of stuff. Today Sandra can finally talk about her secret life, though she does so reluctantly and with a jarring mixture of disgust and wistfulness. As her husband looks on, she speaks of the "uncontrollable urge" she felt when she was about to shoplift and of the "euphoric rush" she got when the act was done. She is a short plump woman with reddish hair and dark circles around her eyes, and when she speaks, especially of the pleasure she got from shoplifting, her face takes on a wide-eyed childish look. She is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with these words: "I'm just a kid trapped in this 50-year-old body."
"You don't think about the consequences," Sandra says, "just like a child doesn't think about a spanking he or she might get for doing something wrong. But there's always a consequence. If it's not getting caught, it's the downer you have afterward. And toward the end, the euphoric highs didn't come anymore. It took more and more stealing to satisfy."
The shame was overwhelming. Finally, just before Christmas 1994, Sandra's hidden life abruptly came into the open. Caught shoplifting compact discs-Christmas music-she spent a long and humiliating night in jail. Since then she's been forced to confront her problem, to talk about it, to shine a light into the darkness of her psyche. She has a long way to go, maybe the rest of her life, to fully understand why she needed to steal, but she knows that at last she's on the right track.
In the meantime she's discovered something that brings a measure of relief
and perhaps even purpose as she struggles:
She's found that she isn't alone.
THEIR STORIES PUT THE LIE to our illusions about happiness and success. As with alcoholism, the impulse to shoplift cuts across class, achievement, and social status. In Pennsylvania in 1988 Bess Myerson, a former Miss America and New York City cultural affairs commissioner, pleaded guilty to shoplifting $44 worth of nail polish, earrings, batteries, and sandals from a discount department store. That same year in Ohio former Cleveland mayor Carl Stokes walked out of a suburban hardware store with a $2.39 screwdriver in his pocket. And in Virginia in 1993 then-acting secretary of the army John W. Shannon was caught stealing a blouse and a skirt from the store at Fort Myer. A few months before, he'd found out he was being passed over for the permanent position.
One million or more shoplifting "events," as law enforcement lingo has it, are reported each year, and the number is growing; it jumped 45 percent between 1986 and 1995, while other forms of theft dropped. In most cases there's no mystery to shoplifting: The vast majority of offenders are impetuous adolescents, down-and-out unfortunates, or two-bit criminals. They steal because they're driven by the desire for a thrill or dire financial need, or because they're dishonest. But according to expert estimates, about 5 percent of shoplifters are kleptomaniacs: people, mostly women, who steal because they can't stop themselves. Another 10 to 15 percent have some other psychological disturbance that helps explain their actions.
No matter how much a kleptomaniac tries to resist, she repeatedly takes an emotional roller-coaster ride. First comes a building sense of tension, then a growing urge to steal and unbearable anxiety if the impulse is resisted. Theft brings a flood of pleasure and release, a thrill described in terms commonly reserved for the highs brought by drugs or sex. Then comes a feeling of guilt, and the cycle begins again.
Financial gain isn't the point; a kleptomaniac's haul seldom is worth much. The stolen items are often useless even to the thief and may be discarded, given away, or returned. "I remember one of the first patients I saw, a lady who used to steal bells," says John Bradford, a psychiatrist at the University of Ottawa. "She would go to the store and pick up these big brass bells, put them under her dress, and walk out-dingdong, dingdong-get caught every time. Another man used to shoplift tins of salmon. And he didn't even eat fish."
Bradford was in charge of the section on kleptomania when the bible of the mental health field, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, was updated in 1994. The bewildering contradictions at the heart of the disorder, he says, have been evident for nearly two centuries, since Charles Chretien Marc and Etienne Esquirol defined kleptomania as a conscious urge to steal in an otherwise normal individual. The person may disapprove of stealing and strive against the urge, they added, "but by its nature it is irresistible." Which, of course, begs the question: Why can't these apparently honest people resist their larcenous impulse? After all, the only proof that an urge is irresistible is that it isn't resisted. Scientists offered little in the way of an answer for more than 150 years. Until recently there had been no rigorous investigation of kleptomania's causes or possible treatments. But in the past decade research has provided a clue.
At Harvard University in the late 1980s psychiatrist Susan McElroy was studying women with bulimia, who compulsively overate and then purged. This was during the first flush of excitement over Prozac and similar drugs that raise the level of serotonin, one of the main chemical messengers that brain cells use to communicate. Some researchers had noticed that these serotonin-reuptake inhibitors seemed to help people with eating disorders. But when McElroy gave one such drug to 42 of the women, it worked even better than expected, relieving a problem the scientist hadn't realized the women were experiencing. Reporting back, a few of j\1cElroy's patients said, in essence, "Not only have we stopped vomiting, we've stopped shoplifting!"
McElroy began to turn her attention to the links between kleptomania and an assortment of other psychological maladies, including eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia; the so-called impulse-control disorders (pyromania and pathological gambling, for instance); the obsessive-compulsive disorders that have sufferers washing their hands, say, hundreds of times a day; and clinical depression.
If a person has one of these ills, there's a good chance she or a family member suffers from another as well. And there are other connections. "Eating disorders look a lot like kleptomania," McElroy says. "These women are doing something they don't want to do. They resist, anxiety mounts, they do it and feel relief. Then guilt sets in, and anxiety builds again. The same medicine works for depression, eating disorders, and kleptomania. We believe they're just different manifestations of one illness."
In other words, if a dollop of serotonin is part of the solution-if it damps down the urge to steal, to binge-eat, to gamble, even to shower fifty times a day-then maybe the problem is in part a lack of the neurotransmitter. "We know that people with low levels of serotonin are often impulsive and aggressive," says psychiatrist Eric Hollander, who directs the Compulsive, Impulsive, and Anxiety Disorders Program at the Mt. Sinai School of .Medicine in New York. "They have a tendency to do things without thinking about the consequences. There are interesting gender differences, although it's not clear why. Men whose serotonin levels are low are more likely to gamble, intermittently explode or beat their wives, act out sexually, or set fires. Women are more likely to have kleptomania, compulsively shop, or binge-eat."
The idea that kleptomania may be traceable to a biochemical imbalance and that
the imbalance can be remedied with drugs-has changed treatment, which historically
has been a grab bag of talk therapy, aversive conditioning, even electroshock.
Now doctors often prescribe serotonin-reuptake inhibitors or other antidepressants
even for shoplifters who don't quite fit the strict diagnostic criteria for
kleptomania but who clearly aren't your garden-variety crook. People like Sandra.
They seem like upstanding citizens, says Toronto psychologist Will Cupchik,
who's studied court-referred shoplifters for almost two decades. Having counseled
executives, lawyers, police officers, and psychiatrists and psychologists, Cupchik
coined a label: atypical theft offender. While a kleptomaniac, by definition,
doesn't steal to express anger or obtain vengeance, such emotions frequently
if subconsciously drive atypical theft offenders, Cupchik says. "Shoplifting-
'I've suffered a loss, I'll cause a loss for someone else'-can be a form of
retribution."
Usually such shoplifters are under great marital or familial stress. Many are seriously depressed. Some are what psychiatrist Bradford calls absentminded shoplifters: Their problems so occupy their minds they simply aren't paying attention. They go into a shop, pick up an item, stuff it in their pockets, even walk out with it in their hands. When they get nabbed, they inevitably look at the incriminating loot and say, "Where the hell did I get this?" Others steal more purposefully. "They're depressed, and they feel bad about themselves," Bradford says. "In some instances they steal because it makes them feel bad, and that fits with their self-image. 'If I'm such a bad person,' they'll say, 'and bad people steal, well, I may as well steal'."
Sandra says almost those very words after showing off her basement. She's been telling the story of her childhood, how her father had been an alcoholic, how she and her brother had been abandoned by their mother, had gone to a foster home and then been adopted. Her mother had kept two other children. "How could you take your two middle children and give them away?" Sandra says, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. "They must be pretty bad for you to do that. And a bad person does bad things."
Sandra's adoptive mother was a strict disciplinarian; when Sandra was molested at age 12, she felt she had nowhere to turn. Just after she and Tom married, she arranged a meeting with her natural siblings, but it didn't go well. She felt rejected. Her shoplifting began shortly after that.
SANDRA IS LOOKING over her shoulder. Stores remind her of the bad old days, such as the time a former high school classmate turned out to be a store detective. He called her house after he caught her, and that was the first Tom heard about her shoplifting. He didn't understand it, but he stuck by her, hoping she'd get better. In his head he began connecting her moods and behavior to her traumatic childhood. So did the psychologist she started seeing for her depression.
Over the years, though, the urges kept coming. Had she been in this Wal-Mart during those times, she would have had a big purse riding in the shopping cart right in front of her. That way she could surround the purse with items and drop trinkets into it unnoticed. Tonight Sandra doesn't carry a purse. She knows she can't afford to ever again. She's learned that partly through her years of therapy, and she accepts it with the help of an antidepressant. The lesson is reinforced weekly at a meeting of recovering shoplifters like herself-a group called CASA, for Kleptomaniacs and Shoplifters Anonymous (the correct spelling of kleptomania was sacrificed to form the Spanish word for home). CASA, which meets in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, Michigan, is one of only three or four such groups in the country.
There she meets with people like Terry Shulman, a lawyer, and Mary, a receptionist for a Fortune 500 company. Mary, 65, grew up without a mother. "After having five children in eight years she had a breakdown when 1 was born and went off to a hospital," Mary says. Though she married and had children, Mary felt isolated and alone. To please her mother-in-law, she shoplifted a bottle of perfume for her. Mary was caught many times, finally spending a night in jail in 1994.
"My father was an alcoholic," says Shulman, 32, the founder of the group. "Not to blame him, which 1 admit I used to do. But my childhood was just years and years of hoping he would stop drinking, and trying my best to be a good kid and help out after the divorce when 1 was ten. Somehow trying to be Superman." Shulman began shoplifting, trying to steal back the comfort he felt had been stolen from him. In 1992 be started CASA. But even today he considers himself in recovery. The day of the group meeting, after having lunch out, he spies a folded USA Today on a table next to a plate of abandoned french fries. He stops, looks, then turns away. "See," he says, "before, I would have been thinking, Hey, that newspaper-I wonder if 1 can get it. I wonder if anyone's watching." He's already read today's paper, so he doesn't need it except somewhere deep inside.
The meetings help a lot, Sandra says, and she hopes they become the rule for all recovering shoplifters. The way the system works, a shoplifter's fate depends on the amount stolen and where the theft occurred. Sometimes the sentence is jail; sometimes it's attendance at a court-sponsored group. People at those meetings often don't speak freely about their histories or lapses, since they'd risk more charges, Sandra says. But CASA, modeled loosely on Alcoholics Anonymous, does Sandra good-to hear these honest stories, to witness this raw pain, to know beyond a doubt she isn't alone.
Sandra's psychologist is nudging her to begin parting with all of the stuff that's clogging her house and her life. To that end she's been trying to gear up for a garage sale, but she doesn't feel quite ready. Maybe next week.
"It's good that they've got so much security," she says, wheeling her empty cart past the checkout. "The mom-and-pop stores have the worst security. But then you feel like you're stealing from Mom and Pop."
Safely outside and noticeably relieved, she stops for a minute in the sallow light of the parking lot. "I'd say that most of my adult life I've felt like a child," she says. She's suddenly smiling. She explained earlier that she'd always been called Sandy but now insists on Sandra. It's part of growing up for her. So was her insistence that Tom not be in the courtroom when she was sentenced to probation. She wants, at last, to take charge of her life and even to give some help to others. She plans to start her own self-help group soon. "I want to feel like an adult," says Sandra, "but I want to be happy like a child."
Across the parking lot a pair of low beams comes on, and Tom heads over to pick her up. Sandra goes to meet him, empty-handed and proud.
James Morgan's most recent book is If These Walls Had Ears: The Biography of a House, published by Warner Books.