Economy needs people to get sick

At least for now, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — which is known as the DSM and is something like the bible of psychological maladies — does not list the condition as a technical disease. While shopaholism, as the laymen say, has been recognized by the German psychiatric community as a subset of obsessive-compulsive disorder, it still awaits its day in the United States.

According to April Benson, author of “I Shop, Therefore I Am: Compulsive Buying and the Search for Self,” that day is almost certain to arrive.