It’s Tuesday lunchtime and several emails have come in asking, “I’m writing an article about why someone with a high salary would shoplift, and I’d love to chat to a forensic psychologist about it,” and, “We’re doing an explainer this afternoon on why people shoplift and are looking for comment from an expert in psychology. I wondered if you or anyone from your team would be available to speak about this today?”
I’d be surprised if you haven’t made the connection – Green MP Golriz Ghahraman had just resigned after allegations of shoplifting. But if you’re the email recipient and you’ve been in a media blackout, say, over the holidays, this is a wee bit naughty. There’s the risk that someone might agree to a chat, only to then find out it’s about a specific person.
In my field, we have to be really careful about providing commentary on real people, particularly if the story has anything to do with mental health.
In one case some years ago, I was asked to talk about causes of suicide and the journalist didn’t mention they were writing about a celebrity who had died.
I’m sure these journos would have made it clear in a chat that they were specifically interested in Ghahraman, but it can make it harder for an expert to back out at that point – there’s already a foot in the door.
I am not a clinical psychologist, so I’m not going to diagnose someone. Even if I was a registered clinical psychologist, it would be unethical to speculate about diagnosis of someone you’ve never assessed, and even if you had, that would be confidential.
But I do know rather a lot about mental health research. I could tell you that some people enjoy the rush of doing something illegal and getting away with it. I could say that breaking the law in this way can give people a sense of efficacy they otherwise don’t feel in their lives.
I could tell you that shoplifting can be a symptom of an impulse control disorder – when someone has trouble resisting the urge to do something they know isn’t good for them. It doesn’t have to be stealing, it could be gambling, arguing or fighting.
When a person has a specific and recurring urge to steal things they don’t need, and that builds until it feels overwhelming but abates during and after acting on that urge, then we’re heading into kleptomania territory – a specific subtype of impulse control disorder.
People who experience these symptoms try to resist the impulse to nick stuff, they worry about getting caught, and feel guilty or depressed if they “give in” to the urge. They also know that stealing is wrong, and that stealing any particular thing is senseless. It sounds pretty stressful.
The American Psychiatric Association notes that kleptomania is “incredibly rare”, experienced by 0.3-0.6% of the population. Contrast that with, say, the adult incidence of depression at about 5% (or more). Or shoplifting for that matter: police received 176,732 reports of retail theft in 2022, up from 145,058 in 2021. And that’s just the reported cases.
This rarity is important because it’s a simple reality of our psychology that there are often really mundane reasons for the things we do. Theft is more common when the economy is depressed and/or when inflation is increasing because, well, people can’t afford stuff. Remember this as the unemployment rate goes up.
Please note that I am not, for one second, talking about anyone in particular. I just have the luxury of access to a world-class research library, the time to use those resources, and the opportunity to enlighten some people.
