Kleptomania is the inability to resist the urge to steal items, usually for reasons other than personal use or financial gain.

Pharmacological treatments using selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), mood stabilizers and opioid receptor antagonists, and other antidepressants along with cognitive behavioral therapy, have yielded positive results.

[7] Some of the fundamental components of kleptomania include recurring intrusive thoughts, impotence to resist the compulsion to engage in stealing, and the release of internal pressure following the act.

[8][9] People diagnosed with kleptomania often have other types of disorders involving mood, anxiety, eating, impulse control, and drug use.

[10] There is a difference between ordinary theft and kleptomania: "ordinary theft (whether planned or impulsive) is deliberate and motivated by the usefulness of the object or its monetary worth," whereas with kleptomania, there "is the recurrent failure to resist impulses to steal items even though the items are not needed for personal use or for their monetary value.

A contemporary social approach proposes that kleptomania is an outcome of consumerism and the large quantity of commodities in society.

[14] Drive theory was used to propose that the act of stealing is a defense mechanism which serves to modulate or keep undesirable feelings or emotions from being expressed.

Cognitive-behavioral practitioners often conceptualize the disorders as being the result of operant conditioning, behavioral chaining, distorted cognitions, and poor coping mechanisms.

"Maintaining" cognitions provided additional reinforcement for stealing behaviors and included feelings of vindication and pride, for example: "score one for the 'little guy' against the big corporations".

Although those thoughts were often afterward accompanied by feelings of remorse, this came too late in the operant sequence to serve as a viable punisher.

[20] Biological models explaining the origins of kleptomania have been based mostly on pharmacotherapy treatment studies that used selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), mood stabilizers, and opioid receptor antagonists.

This would suggest that poor regulation of serotonin, dopamine, and/or natural opioids within the brain are to blame for kleptomania, linking it with impulse control and affective disorders.

[21]: 378–84 According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders fourth edition (DSM IV-TR), a frequent and widely used guide for the diagnosis of mental disorders, the following symptoms and characteristics are the diagnostic criteria for kleptomania: Skeptics have decried kleptomania as an invalid psychiatric concept exploited in legal defenses of wealthy female shoplifters.

This point achieves support from the unusually higher cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD; see below) in close relatives of patients with kleptomania.

Family history data also propose a probable common genetic input to alcohol use and kleptomania.

Studies examining the comorbidity of OCD in subjects with kleptomania have inconsistent results, with some showing a relatively high co-occurrence (45%-60%)[23][24] while others demonstrate low rates (0%-6.5%).

Hysteria, imbecility, cerebral defect, and menopause were advanced as theories to explain these seemingly nonsensical behaviors, and many linked kleptomania to immaturity, given the inclination of young children to take whatever they want.

[37] The term kleptomania was derived from the Greek words κλέπτω (klepto) "to steal" and μανία (mania) "mad desire, compulsion".

[38] In the early twentieth century, kleptomania was viewed more as a legal excuse for self-indulgent haut bourgeois ladies than a valid psychiatric ailment by French psychiatrists.

[39][40] Sigmund Freud, the creator of controversial psychoanalytic theory, believed that the underlying dynamics of human behaviours associated with uncivilized savages—impulses were curbed by inhibitions for social life.

In 1924, one of his followers, Wilhelm Stekel, read the case of a female kleptomaniac who was driven by suppressed sexual urges to take hold of "something forbidden, secretly".

[44] Empirically based conceptual articles have argued that kleptomania is becoming more common than previously thought, and occurs more frequently among women than men.