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.