Is shoplifting an illness?
In the early 1950s, Lady Isobel Barnett, wife of the lord mayor of Leicester, became a celebrity in Britain as a panelist on the BBC's version of What's My Line? Last month Lady Barnett, 62 and widowed ten years, faced a panel herself: a jury considering charges that she shoplifted a tin of tuna and a carton of cream worth about $2. She admitted slipping the items into a cloth bag pinned inside her coat, but insisted it was an oversight, and she told the court the cloth bag was where she kept a flashlight as protection against muggers. Lady Barnett was convicted and sentenced to pay $650 in fines and court costs. Said she: "I have only myself to live with, and I can live with myself." Four days later, she was found electrocuted in her bath, apparently a suicide.
The story was front-page news in Britain. The day after her death, one tabloid ran a purported interview with Lady Barnett, complete with the headline "PLEASE HELP ME—I CAN'T STOP STEALING." The shopkeeper who had turned in Barnett received abusive letters. Wrote Novelist Penelope Mortimer, in the Evening Standard: "Isobel Barnett's disguise had been cracking for some time. No woman of her intelligence steals so clumsily unless she wants to get caught."
Amidst all the hoopla, one main question emerged: Is compulsive shoplifting an emotional disorder or just common thievery? Daily Mail Columnist Lynda Lee-Potter said she had interviewed dozens of alleged women shoplifters and found a strong pattern: most were widowed or emotionally neglected by their husbands, and they felt no sense of dishonesty; the thefts were frequently a thrilling escape from monotony and depression, and occasionally were sexually arousing. According to Lee-Potter, one woman told her, "I got an orgasm every time I slipped something into my handbag."
Psychiatrists think that kleptomania—compulsive theft for neurotic rather than economic motives—is a symptom of many different kinds of emotional stress, so they have no standard profile of the kleptomaniac. Many say the disorder is associated with depression and a sense of entitlement; the shoplifter is in effect saying, "I have been treated so harshly that I deserve the things I take." Says New York City Psychologist Donald Kaplan: "It is a kind of unconscious moral reasoning, demanding restitution." Adds Vanderbilt University Psychiatrist Pietro Castelnuovo-Tedesco, "They feel they have been victims of theft in the past, and they are simply evening the score."