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Other psychiatrists reject the guilt free explanation and insist that the disorder involves heavy guilt, compulsive risk-taking and the desire to be caught. Says Jon E. Gudeman, psychiatrist at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center: "Some feel unworthy and feel a need to be punished." Irene Stiver, a psychologist at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., says that many well-off patients in therapy admit to kleptomania, but only after several months of treatment. "It is the risk-taking," she says, "the excitement of getting away with something." Maurice Lipsedge, a consultant psychiatrist at Guy's Hospital in London, thinks shoplifting by women has a good deal in common with male exhibitionism: both are risky acts indulged in by the middleaged, and usually lead to punishment that comes somehow as a great relief. Says Lipsedge: "It's akin to any high-risk activity, like gunrunning or gambling."
Many in Britain think shoplifters should be offered special treatment, perhaps a discreet warning for a first offense. But dissenters argue that given such an opening, every thief would quickly develop symptoms of kleptomania when caught in the act. Whatever effect Lady Barnett's death may have on the reform of shoplifting laws, some noncompulsive thieves added a ghoulish touch to the debate: while members of her family were attending a memorial service, thieves broke into Lady Barnett's manor house near Leicester and stole $14,400 worth of silver.