Why Usually Honest People Steal: Understanding, Treating and Stopping Nonsensical Shoplifting and Other Bizarre Theft Behavior

For over 39 years, psychologist Dr. Will Cupchik has investigated the atypical theft behavior of usually honest, generally intelligent, often successful and sometimes even wealthy and/or prominent members of society, persons who he and his original co-investigator, psychiatrist Dr Don J Atcheson termed Atypical Theft Offenders (ATOs). These individuals are virtually always at a loss to adequately explain to themselves, other laypersons and the professionals they must deal with, sensible reasons for their personally and professionally self-destructive behaviors.

This book will help you finally understand the reasons for such behavior and includes several original pen-and-paper tools, including the Theft Offender Spectrum, the Theft Offender Questionnaire, and the Brief Screening Interview Questionnaire. Using a number of composite remarkable cases, Dr Cupchik lifts the veil on the fascinating reasons for such atypical theft behavior.

The book also offers a great deal of information garnered from Dr Cupchik's three major studies, including his most recent 2013 study that involved some 30 cases from his entire data base of over 700 cases. His findings offer important information about the personal histories and personality issues that many so-called Atypical Theft Offenders have in common, regardless of their socioeconomic backgrounds.

Among his findings are the clear contraindications for the use of antidepressants for those persons who might commit acts of theft.

One of the tables provided in this book allows the reader to compare his or her own personal history with those of the persons of the 2013 study on over 50 different factors.

For twelve years (1974-86) Dr Cupchik worked on the forensic service of the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto; here he began his investigations of ATO cases. Since 1986 he has worked with ATOs from within his private practice and now works with clients utilizing three different programs that he describes in this book: (1) an in-office, 4-day, 20-session Intensive Intervention Program; (2) a live Internet-enabled, 20-session Intensive Intervention Program, and (3) a 17-session, Skype-based Individualized Educational Program.

Having assessed, and in most cases treated, over 700 such cases, Dr Cupchik has developed training programs for mental health professionals who wish to work with these fascinating clients.

Dr Will Cupchik is a life member of the American Psychological Association, Canadian Psychological Association and Ontario Psychological Association. He was senior author of the 1983 groundbreaking, peer-reviewed article Shoplifting: An Occasional Crime of the Moral Majority, which is still available for reading online on the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law website. He has taught psychotherapy courses to graduate students at the University of Toronto. In the early 1960s Dr Cupchik worked as a graduate electronics engineer designing navigational guidance systems for American and other countries’ military airplanes.