One woman haunts the malls, prowling the aisles for at least three hours every day. Another has been on buying binges that leave her with $20,000 of credit-card debt. A third can't fall asleep at night until she orders something from the Home Shopping Network.
Driven by an overwhelming desire to spend, compulsive shoppers can wreck their lives. Most are women who have low self-esteem and high rates of depression and anxiety. "We are encouraged to believe that our self-worth is determined by our possessions," says Lorrin Koran, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.
Now Koran is launching the first study of a drug to treat this addiction, testing the effectiveness of a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor -- a drug in the same family as Prozac. Participants will receive the unidentified drug for 12 weeks. Then they'll monitor their shopping expenses, and Koran will gauge their progress. By mid-December, Koran had received about 150 calls from people interested in volunteering for the study.
Compulsive shopping, identified as an "impulse control" disorder, was first described in a German psychiatric text in 1915, but it has not been the focus of much research. Shopaholics typically try to cope by cutting up credit cards or avoiding stores. This is the first study to test drug therapy. Koran hopes it will lead to a treatment for people who can't make a routine trip to the mall without running up a big bill.
