Compulsive Spending: Both Sexes Do It

Forget the gender stereotypes about compulsive buying. Men do it, too.

That's what researchers including Lorrin Koran, MD, report in The American Journal of Psychiatry. Koran works in the psychiatry department at Stanford University's medical school in California.

Compulsive buying has mainly been studied in women, Koran's team notes. But if their findings are correct, compulsive buying is just as common among men.

Compulsive buying isn't in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), the handbook of psychiatric disorders. But Koran and others have suggested that it should be.

"Compulsive buying leads to serious psychological, financial, and family problems including depression, overwhelming debt, and the breakup of relationships," Koran says in a Stanford news release. "People don't realize the extent of the damage it does to the sufferer."