KLEPTOMANIA...
not!
Kleptomania
is one of the most commonly used and misused
terms in both the legal-clinical field, and the public at large.
In
fact, after over 28 years in the forensic field, it is entirely clear to
Dr. Cupchik and his original co-researcher, Dr. Don Atcheson
(formerly senior psychiatrist on the same forensic service of the Clarke
Institute of Psychiatry) that the term kleptomania is probably seldom
used correctly in the courts or even by most clinicians, let alone
in the court of public opinion as led by a too often misinformed media.
As
a result, 10'000s or 100,000s of theft offenders in the U.S. judicial
system alone are llikely mis-labeled, each and every year as suffering
from kleptomania, when our clinical investigations have indicated that
probably much less than 5% of shoplifting cases involve true instances
of kleptomania.
Because
people have so frequently been mis-diagnosed and mis-labeled as
suffering from kleptomania, these individuals are seldom successfully
assisted to stop stealing; then, every time they re-offend, the system
and the public reinforce the 'kleptomania' label (wrongly) yet again,
and again...
Q- On what grounds
have the above statements been made?
A- On the basis of the
fact that the official psychiatric definition of kleptomania, according
to the American Psychiatric Association's DSM (Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual) clearly states, two of the
defining criteria of kleptomania are that, (1) the person who has
stolen has not done so out of anger or vengeance, and (2) there
is no external triggering event that preceeds the theft behavior.
Time
and again, in the great majority of cases that Drs. Cupchik and Atcheson
have assessed and treated during the past more than 28 years, persons
who had committed what for them were atypical acts of theft, sometimes
frequently and seemingly uncontrollably, (1) been very angry indeed
at the time of the thefts, and often (2) the thefts were
acts of vengeance (carried out to embarrass or otherwise impact
spouses, bosses or other individuals or companies). Furthermore, there
virtually always was an external triggering event (such as a major
stressful event like, for example, the loss of a spouse, home or living
situation, job, health, etc...)
For
the above-stated reasons, these cases should never have been labeled as
instances of kleptomania. To have done so also has usually resulted in
either no treatment or mis-treatment, with the result that
the persons' underlying reasons for stealing have remained undetected
and un-dealt with. Consequently, since there has been no corrective
treatment applied, the probability of re-offending is high. If, or more
likely when, the individual does steal again, the
uninformed clinician, lawyer, or judge may then erroneously think (and
probably say): "Ah, ha! That just proves the theft offender is a
kleptomaniac." WRONG!!!
Unfortunately,
a few clinicians have added to the muddying the psychological
waters by suggesting that, even though the
American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
(DSM) makes it very clear that an individual should only be
labeled as suffering from kleptomania if he or she is not
acting out of anger or vengeance, and if there is no external
triggering event, these
clinicians has suggested that the DSM criteria are only 'suggestions'.
That is not so!
In
fact, there are a very few individuals to whom the label of
'kleptomania' probably does apply. (In our nearly three decades of
clinical work with usually and otherwise honest people who steal, Dr.
Atcheson and I believe we have encountered only one or two of such cases
each, out of the several hundred atypical theft offenders we have
assessed and treated professionally.
As
I have indicated in my book, a future version of DSM would be well
advised to employ the term 'atypical theft offender' to refer to all
those whose stealing is atypical of their usual ways of functioning in
the world; a small subset of these persons could correctly be referred
to as suffering from kleptomania. Most however, are not. While there are
indeed ways and means of assessing, identifying and treating most
atypical theft offenders, there is, at present, no reliable way of
treating those exceedingly few persons who suffer from kleptomania.
Most persons who display what is, for
them, atypical theft behavior, are more correctly termed Atypical Theft
Offenders, a term introduced into the professional literature by Drs.
Cupchik and Atcheson, in a chapter entitled, Shoplifting: An
Occasional Crime of the Moral Majority, in the book Clinical
Criminology: The Assessment and Treatment of Criminal Behavior,
published in 1985.
This
web site describes cases of atypical theft behavior; while it is
true that 'kleptomaniacs' may belong to the category of
offenders we have termed 'Atypical Theft Offenders', most Atypical
Theft Offenders are not kleptomaniacs.
On
the many pages of this web site, and in Dr. Cupchik's book, you
will learn a good deal about why compulsive shoplifters (and other theft
offenders) steal.
