Kleptomania

This piece called Kleptomania Statistics says nothing about what I was hoping to find -- which was income and social class for such people -- and I am skeptical of the reliability of what it does say.

Kleptomania (klep-toe-MAY-nee-uh) is a mental health disorder that involves repeatedly being unable to resist urges to steal items that you generally don't really need. Often the items stolen have little value and you could afford to buy them.

So if you steal food because you are dirt poor, no one would consider that to be a mental health disorder. The implicit context for kleptomania that no one talks about is that in order to do this at all and have a qualified professional deem it to be a mental health disorder is you need to be comfortably well off.

This is implicitly a mental disorder of the upper classes. This is a compulsion to steal for emotional reasons unrelated to material want or inability to pay.

And I believe it's likely undercounted and underreported and as the net worth of the kleptomaniac goes up, so does the value of the items stolen.

If you are a middle class kleptomaniac, you steal things you could easily afford as a middle class person. If you are a millionaire or billionaire or married to a millionaire or billionaire, you may steal designer clothes and other expensive items and count on people not suspecting you of the theft because why would someone so wealthy steal something they can clearly afford?

There are inherent challenges in getting reliable statistics for criminal behavior, mental health issues and other private details. Rest assured, kleptomaniacs are trying to not be seen while taking something.

Sex surveys tend to report average sexual experiences that sound to me like statistical outliers of the wildest sort. AND are typically self reported.

Odds are good that either the people self reporting are extreme outliers with wilder than average sex lives who like bragging or they are outright making stuff up or both. The people declining to tell total strangers about the most private aspects of their lives are probably not doing wild stuff and are probably much more the norm while FEELING inadequate because surveys say everyone else is having a good time while you cry in your coffee every Friday night.

And think about this: If you are already wealthy but no amount of money ever is "enough" in the landscape of your mind, what better way to shore up your bottom line than STEAL things no one would EVER guess you would take? 

The way to bet is there is more kleptomania in the ultra wealthy than among the merely middle class and most likely the dollar value of what they steal is probably substantially higher.

Why? Because the ultra wealthy are typically driven by money in a way other classes are not. And taking a pen they don't need is unlikely to provide any emotional satisfaction to a millionaire or billionaire but taking a designer outfit or diamond necklace would be a satisfying bit of glitter, like a crow collecting ooh, shiny things 

Footnote 

If you run a business selling high-end items that can be pocketed, like jewelry, you can test my hypothesis by coming up with a psychological profile for which of your rich clientele seem emotionally dysfunctional and likely to steal to comfort themselves and then try to compare dates stuff went missing to dates they visited your establishment.