Compulsive buying disorder

Compulsive buying disorder (CBD), or oniomania (from Greek ὤνιος ṓnios 'for sale' and μανία manía 'insanity'), is characterized by an obsession with shopping and buying behavior that causes adverse consequences. It "is experienced as an irresistible–uncontrollable urge, resulting in excessive, expensive and time-consuming retail activity [that is] typically prompted by negative affectivity" and results in "gross social, personal and/or financial difficulties". Most people with CBD meet the criteria for a personality disorder. Compulsive buying can also be found among people with Parkinson's disease or frontotemporal dementia. Compulsive buying-shopping disorder is classified by ICD-11 among "other specified impulse control disorders". Several authors have considered compulsive shopping rather as a variety of dependence disorder. According to German physician Max Nordau, French psychiatrist Valentin Magnan coined the term oniomania in the 1892 German translation of his Psychiatric Lectures (Psychiatrische Vorlesungen). Magnan describes compulsive buying as a symptom of social degeneration. In his book Degeneration (1892), Nordau calls oniomania or "buying craze" a "stigma of degeneration". Emil Kraepelin described oniomania as of 1909, and he and Bleuler both included the syndrome in their influential early psychiatric textbooks. Kraepelin described oniomania as "a pathological desire to buy... without any actual need and in great quantities", considering it alongside kleptomania and other conditions that were thought to be related to impulsivity (of the type nowadays denoted impulse control disorders). Relatively little interest seems to have been taken in collocating CBD as a distinct pathology until the 1990s. It has been suggested that even in the 21st century, compulsive shopping can be considered a barely recognised mental illness. Since 2019, ICD-11 (the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases) has classified it among "other specified impulse control disorders" (coded as ), using the descriptor compulsive buying-shopping disorder.