Oniomania: a compulsion to shop

After my recent post about affluenza, I just read a piece by Agnès Poirier, author of 'Touché, a French woman's take on the English' in the Guardian where she accuses us Britons of being oniomaniacs.

Poirier largely attributes the difference between the French and the British attitudes towards shopping to the ease with which we can access debt in Britain: 

"When I arrived in Britain 10 years ago, I couldn't understand why banks kept offering me credit cards with huge borrowing limits. Why should they want me to spend what I didn't have, I wondered naively. Surely this would lead to disaster, as I wouldn't be able to pay it back."

"In France, what we mistakenly call credit cards are actually debit cards: you spend what you have, and if you don't have it you don't spend it. Banks don't allow overdraft facilities unless you have substantial assets. The same goes for buying a flat: if you don't have a third of the sum in cash then tough, you just can't buy."

"Britain tops the world league for personal insolvencies: 100,000 people filed for bankruptcy in 2006. As for "serious debt", officially it affects only 1 million citizens in Britain, but a report carried out for the Conservative party puts the actual figure at 8 million, with 40% of the population unable to pay off their credit card debts each month."

In a possibly less politically motivated study, two Stanford Medical School researchers found that approximately 6% of people in the U.S. could reasonably be classified as compulsive shoppers based on the responses they gave to a 13 item scale administered by telephone poll.