Treatment for Co-Occurring Depression and Shopping Addiction Helps You Break the Cycle

“It was a thrill,” Monica says. “It made me feel alive and vibrant. It gave me something to want, something to do, something to make me feel okay. And for a while, I would be okay, but it would always go away and I would always need more.” The way Monica speaks echoes the sentiments of countless people who struggle with addiction. But Monica isn’t addicted to alcohol or cocaine. She doesn’t do heroin and she’s never smoked pot. In fact, her addiction has nothing to do with substance use at all.

Monica suffers from shopping addiction, an impulse control disorder that affects an estimated 5.8% of the population in the United States and is marked by “a preoccupation with shopping, prepurchase tension or anxiety, and a sense of relief following the purchase.” Dr. Ruth Engs, an expert on shopping addiction, says, “[People with this impulse control disorder] go out and buy, to get a high, or get a ‘rush’ just like a drug or alcohol addict,” often to escape the distress of co-occurring mental health disorders like depression. Relief, however, is short-lived and, over time, symptoms typically intensify as overspending becomes a new source of stress. “Shopping and spending will not assure more love, bolster self-esteem, or heal the hurts, regrets, stress, and the problems of daily living,” Dr. Engs explains. “It generally makes these feelings worse because of the increased financial debt the person has obtained from compulsive shopping.”

Like so many others caught in the grip of shopping addiction, Monica’s impulse control disorder started slowly. “It wasn’t like one day I just maxed out my credit cards in some wild spending spree,” she tells me. “It was more gradual. I was going through a hard time in my marriage and was feeling so lonely and lost. Shopping gave me a pick-me-up.” But as her psychological turmoil deepened, her shopping went beyond benign retail therapy and entered more challenging terrain.

In retrospect, I should have gone to a doctor, but instead I went to the mall. I started buying progressively more and more expensive items, things I had no use for and would never wear. But in the moment, I wasn’t thinking past the purchase; it was the act of buying that was so exhilarating to me.

What wasn’t exhilarating, however, was juggling the credit card bills that followed her spending sprees, and soon she was scrambling to stay afloat. “My husband and I were talking about divorce and my main motivation for staying married was avoiding financial disclosure in divorce proceedings,” Monica says. “I didn’t want him – or anyone else – to find out how bad things were.” As her financial problems mounted, her depression deepened, and so too did the overwhelming impulse to drown her sorrows in shopping bags full of clothes.

Then the call came. Having exhausted her options for staying current on her credit card bills, she had been sent to collections and it was her husband who answered the phone when the collection agency rang. “Everything froze when he picked up that phone,” she confides. It was the moment she had been fearing for months, but when it finally arrived she felt something she never expected: relief. “It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t hide anymore, it was that I didn’t have to hide anymore.” There was no screaming, no confrontation, no panic. Instead, she simply told her husband everything. While he listened, and as the words came tumbling out, she began to see herself with a newfound clarity; she was a woman in a deep and enduring emotional struggle trying desperately to find a way out.