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.
Four free chapters
(actually, the entire first 45 pages or so, or nearly the first 15%) of the
revised edition of Dr. Cupchik's book,
