It would seem that the rapid growth of online commerce has some advantages: you don’t need to go anywhere to buy high-quality and inexpensive things, just open the Internet – and in five minutes you can become a quick owner of items from the latest collection of any fashion house. The advent of marketplaces has made shopping an order of magnitude faster and easier. But everything has a downside: some shoppers have become truly obsessed with online shopping. Moreover, to such an extent that specialized doctors demand to recognize oniomania (another name for shopaholism) as a mental disorder. Not prone to alarmism, “Subtleties” decided to find out if the doctors had gone overboard this time. As defined by the World Health Organization, mental disorders include changes in thinking, emotional regulation, and behavior. Often these disorders are accompanied by prolonged stress. Studies conducted by representatives of the Hannover Medical School (Germany) show that people who are obsessed with shopping have all this. At least that's how psychiatrists interpret them. Online shopaholics put everything in virtual baskets indiscriminately and sit on marketplaces for hours, do not see a problem in their addiction, get angry when they want to reason with them and try to hide their mania from loved ones. They do not keep track of the amount of money spent, sometimes getting into serious debts, they experience euphoria during shopping, and before and after shopping they can be tormented by anxiety, depression and remorse.
Symptoms present?
There are chances
In the International Classification of Diseases, there is not yet an item called online shopaholism – but gambling addiction was not there until relatively recently. Whether a new disorder appears in the ICD depends on the global medical community. It is unlikely that this will happen right now: there is still not enough data to recognize online shopping as a mental disorder. The researchers studied data from just 122 people who sought medical help because of their mania to constantly relieve anxiety or improve their mood with uncontrolled purchases. But if you estimate, by analogy with the same gambling addiction, how many online shopaholics do not reach doctors, it becomes clear that this problem is quite serious.
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