Brenna says she shoplifted every day of her life for 45 years before finally stopping last year in her 60s. She has been caught on just three occasions. The second is etched in her memory.
A security guard was already watching her when she slipped a pack of batteries into her bag at a Canadian Tire. She made her way to the exit but was intercepted. Her heart raced as she was hustled to a back room by the guard, who was much younger than her.
“Shame on you at your age,” she remembers him saying, while they waited for the police to arrive.
He told Brenna she was banned from the store and that her photo would be pinned to the lunchroom wall — a caution to employees and other loss-prevention officers. She was not criminally charged on this occasion, but was ordered to pay $300 in restitution.
“It’s awful,” said Brenna, who asked that her real name not be used. “But not enough to stop you.”
Indeed, Brenna continued shoplifting for another 20 years after that incident.
People like Brenna, who steal compulsively, are often too ashamed to seek help. And when they do, they fall into a diagnostic grey zone that makes it difficult to receive the help they need.
“It’s no different than any of these other addictions, and yet, there’s no help,” Brenna said.
A catch-22
Public health authorities pour resources into addressing substance addictions, like drug or alcohol abuse, because they are prevalent and their consequences, like overdoses, are seen as severe, says Matthew Beasley, a registered clinical counsellor in Vancouver.
Compulsive shoplifters, by contrast, say there is little recognition of their behavioural problems, even though there is a point at which stealing becomes addictive, just like drugs or alcohol.
Brenna, who grew up in a middle-class family in Ontario and has always maintained a full-time job, says the thrill and accomplishment of shoplifting eased the pain of an eating disorder she has battled her entire life.
“I found something in life — shoplifting — that is going to make it go away and make me feel good,” she said.
But last year, Brenna started having panic attacks when she could no longer control her shoplifting. She decided to quit. The withdrawal symptoms were almost unbearable: panic attacks, stomach tremors and shoplifting nightmares when she slept.
“I didn’t think I would make it,” she said.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is used by Canadian and American health professionals to diagnose mental disorders, mentioned substance addictions as far back as 1980. Behavioural addictions, like gambling, were not formally recognized as addictions until 2013. Shoplifting is still not recognized as an addiction.
The manual lists kleptomania — defined as the consistent, anxiety driven inability to control an impulse to steal, even when the stolen item has little or no value — as an impulse-control disorder, not an addiction. It refers to the disorder as “exceedingly rare.”
Some psychologists say the manual’s hard-and-fast categorizations, which are based on “yes” or “no” criteria, are unhelpful for individuals who meet only some of the criteria of a disorder. Many have moved to diagnosing on a spectrum. For example, Asperger’s Syndrome, which used to be its own diagnosis, is now placed on the lower end of the autism spectrum and called Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Substance addiction has been given its own spectrum, or “degrees of severity,” said Taryn Grieder, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. But for the criteria of kleptomania to be expanded, or for behavioural addictions such as shoplifting to be recognized on a spectrum, more research is needed.
So far, progress has been slow.
“It’s so underfunded, honestly,” Greider said. “To get into the DSM, you need a certain amount of evidence-based research.” However, “there’s no research being done because they’re not funding it.”
“It’s kind of a catch-22,” Greider said.
Brenna, whose shoplifting behaviours match some of the criteria of kleptomania, has talked with several mental health professionals, but none has diagnosed her with the disorder.
Individuals like her, who do not receive a professional diagnosis, can struggle to get treatment.
“They just get overlooked,” says Beasley, who has been seeing more compulsive shoplifting clients in his own practice.
Mental health professionals say clients are more likely to talk in detail about their drug and alcohol addictions than to mention shoplifting. And compulsive shoplifters rarely speak to their friends and family about it.
“You carry it deep … you just carry it and you don’t talk to anybody about it and then you build up denial,” said Brenna, who hid her compulsive shoplifting from her common-law partner for 10 years. “You make this denial so thick you don’t ever look at it.”
The price of misery
Denise, a pseudonym, is a compulsive shoplifter based in Saskatchewan. She is in her 50s, has been married for more than 30 years and has two grown children. She has been shoplifting since she was a teenager.
Two years ago, she was fired from her retail job of 20 years for stealing. After her family moved to a new town, she continued shoplifting and was quickly caught and banned from a local Costco. She was mortified. Stress caused her to lose her hair — “alopecia,” she said.
“It’s so shameful, and I don’t think that [friends and family] know how to deal with it.”
Shame, guilt and isolation make asking for help or even recognizing a problem difficult, according to multiple recovering shoplifters and behavioural addiction specialists.
But there is another factor that deters recovery. In Canada, help is hard to find. The mental health professionals who do offer services in this area often have limited experience working with shoplifters.
“It’s devastating that a lot of [the] time people are having to go out of the country to seek services,” says Beasley.
Denise saw three therapists in Canada over three years. None specialized in compulsive stealing and the sessions did not stop her from shoplifting.
She says she needed to see a specialist who understood her affliction and a group with which she could commiserate, like Alcoholics Anonymous, to recover. She eventually found it — but in Michigan, not Canada.
The Shulman Center for Compulsive Theft, Spending and Hoarding is a treatment centre based in Franklin, Mich., a village of 3,000 residents located 30 minutes northwest of Detroit by car.
Terrence Shulman, who founded and runs the centre, says the majority of clients he sees in private counselling sessions are there for compulsive shoplifting recovery. Most are lower-to-middle class, college-educated, gainfully employed, middle-aged women (although his oldest client is 88). Women seek therapy more often than men, he says.
Shulman estimates that he has treated between 600 to 700 shoplifters since starting the centre two decades ago. Most have been from the US, although some have come from overseas and about 20 have come from Canada.
Shulman understands compulsive shoplifters. He used to be one. He has been in recovery from stealing since 1990 and has written several books on the subject.
In his counselling sessions, he likes to do an exercise with clients who say their motivation to steal is saving money. He has them add up the value of what they stole in a year, and then subtract the legal, court and divorce expenses that shoplifters commonly rack up.
Sometimes, he says, the calculation will show a profit. But, when he asks them to factor in being fired from their jobs, suffering reputational damage, incurring criminal records and experiencing emotional and relationship turmoil, clients realize they are not coming out ahead.
“You can’t put a price on misery,” Shulman said.
Shulman also started Cleptomaniacs And Shoplifters Anonymous in 1992. Kleptomaniacs is spelt with a “C,” Shulman says, so the group’s acronym can read “CASA” — which means home in Spanish.
The program has in-person meet-ups across the United States. There are no in-person groups in Canada, but a CASA email support group has become a lifeline for Canadians struggling with a behavioural problem to which few can relate. Several Canadians, unable to find an in-person domestic equivalent, have joined the remote email group.
“If it wasn’t for his group, I would have absolutely zero help and support,” said one of the CASA group members. “We get each other, we get each other so much that you don’t have to explain anything,” they said.
‘Addiction full-blown’
Challenging conditions for Canadian shoppers may be spurring a nationwide increase in shoplifting. Overall prices in 2024 are up nearly 19 per cent from 2020, according to the Bank of Canada. The average family of four is expected to spend $700 more on food this year than the last.
Some Canadian retailers have reported a 300 per cent increase in retail theft, says Michelle Wasylyshen, national spokesperson for the Retail Council of Canada, an association that represents retailers. Police-reported shoplifting rose 30 per cent from 2021 to 2022, the most recent year Statistics Canada data is available.
Recovering shoplifters say there is a risk that shoplifting will become an addictive escape for some — fostering a new wave of compulsive shoplifters.
“I believe you’re gonna have addiction full-blown out there,” Brenna said.
When they do rise above their shame to seek help, Brenna and others like her worry these shoplifters won’t find it in Canada.
Today, Brenna is one year from her last theft, but only because she found a recovery system for compulsive shoplifting outside of Canada.
“I haven’t got the fruits of freedom yet, it’s been a year, but I think I’m kind of solving that,” she said. “It’s going to take time.”
Denise, who has also managed to go one year without shoplifting since seeing Shulman and participating in CASA, is keen to ensure compulsive shoplifters are aware of the supports that exist through programs like these.
She is planning on expanding CASA to Saskatchewan. She wants to work with Saskatchewan’s courts to steer criminally charged shoplifters to the group and to Shulman’s shoplifting recovery network.
“My greatest desire is that we would get the information out there, so that the eight times that I was caught, there would have been something for me to turn to,” she said.
For further information on the Shulman Center for Compulsive Theft, Spending and Hoarding, visit their website.
Thanks for the great article.
Here’s the website link for others to find help more easily: http://www.theshulmancenter.com