Kleptomania is one of the most commonly used and misused terms in both the legal-clinical field, and by the public at large.

In fact, after over 38 years of clinical investigations into the seemingly bizarre and non-sensical theft behavior of usually honest individuals, it is abundantly clear 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, many thousands of theft offenders in the U.S. judicial system are likely mis-labeled, each and every year as suffering from kleptomania, when our clinical investigations have indicated that probably much less than 1% 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 treated, usually by the administration of prescribed antidepressants; then, each time they re-offend, the system and the public reinforce the 'kleptomania' label (wrongly) yet again, and then the dosage of antidepressant is increased again, with the same effects. 

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, that in order to classify someone as suffering from kleptomania, the person who has stolen must not have done so out of anger or vengeance.

Time and again, in the great majority of cases that I (Dr Cupchik) and Dr Atcheson assessed and treated during the past decades, persons who had committed what for them were atypical acts of theft, sometimes frequently and seemingly uncontrollably,  have been very angry indeed at the time of the thefts, and very often the thefts were acts of vengeance (carried out to embarrass or otherwise impact spouses, bosses or other individuals or companies). 

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 unrecognized and un-dealt with. Consequently, 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,   these clinicians has suggested that the DSM criteria are only 'suggestions'.  In our decades of clinical work with usually and otherwise honest people who steal, Dr. Atcheson and I believe we only ever encountered a very few such cases, out of the several hundred atypical theft offenders we had assessed and treated professionally.  

As I have indicated in my book, Why Honest People Shoplift..., 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 suffering from this psychiatric problem. 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 myself 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 my book,  you will learn a good deal about why compulsive shoplifters (and other theft offenders) steal.