Personality Quirks: K is for Kleptomania

Kleptomania is a recurring urge to steal or it’s the failure to resist urges to steal. Most often the kleptomaniac steals items with little value and that they heesh doesn’t need. What the kleptomaniac needs is to steal items.

Kleptomania is a serious psychological disorder resulting from an impulse control disorder. Some impulse control disorders are emotional and some are physical self-control issues. Even when the kleptomaniac realizes heesh has the disorder, heesh has trouble resisting temptation. Even when heesh realizes the kleptomania is causing distress or harm to others, heesh has trouble stopping or can’t stop the thefts.

Many kleptomaniacs are ashamed and fear being outed so they won’t seek treatment for the condition. Treatment can’t cure kleptomania but a combination of talk therapy and drugs may help control the compulsion to steal.

Kleptomania comes to us from the Greek kleptes ‘thief’ + mainesthai ‘be mad’ (madness).

Imagine with me some scenarios for developing kleptomania characters in your stories.

What if a bride-to-be realizes, after many puzzling disappearances of small items, that someone is stealing from her, that she is not just misplacing items. She sets up a nanny cam for her bedroom in order to entrap the thief. When the film captures her prospective mother-in-law she wrestles with the information? Does her fiancé know about his mother? What will be his reaction when she shows him the footage? Are her family in denial? Does the bride call off the wedding, or does the groom, after the revelations with no attempt to get his mother treatment?

Or perhaps your villain could be a kleptomaniac whose kleptomania is the undoing of the criminal. Perhaps the kleptomaniac is a killer who identifies victims because of wanting something those people possess. Heesh might find shimself killing others to add to the thrill of stealing. A clever detective figures out the something missing is a clue to the perpetrator.

What if you have a kleptomaniac detective who can’t resist stealing small things from crime scenes being investigated. And what if that detective realizes that one item stolen is the key to unraveling a murder. Does heesh come forward with it, face the consequences, and solve the murder? Does heesh continue to conceal shis theft but work on the side to solve the murder and conceal shis kleptomania?

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Here are some ideas for #writers on creating kleptomaniac #characters from @RomanceRighter  http://bit.ly/2nMyMBD