Compulsive shopping a mental illness?
Compulsive shopping is being looked at as a mental illness according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):
"Compulsive shopping" is increasingly being looked at not just as a silly habit or source of tiffs between spouses, but as a mental disorder. New studies indicate that antidepressants may help, while a budding movement to get compulsive shopping formally recognized as a medical problem could convince more insurers to cover treatments.
...Some critics don't see any reason for that to change. "There is an absurd and frightening proliferation of labels for alleged mental illnesses, and that proliferation is greatly fueled by the drug companies' profit motive," says Paula Caplan, a psychologist and researcher at Brown University, who has written extensively about the overlabeling and diagnosing of mental illnesses. She counted 297 labels for mental illnesses in the previous edition of the manual, compared with 374 in the current edition. "So you have to ask: Are they discovering new mental illnesses at the rate of 11 a year, or are they being invented?"