Compulsive Buying Disorder

Reference: 25-26075

Date response sent: 09/06/2025

Details of enquiry

This query relates to shopping addiction, which is also known as Compulsive Buying Disorder (CBD) or Oniomania. Could the information please be provided in financial years.

1. How many people have been identified as possibly having the condition (Compulsive Buying Disorder – CBD) during the following periods:

a. 2020/21

b. 2021/22

c. 2022/23

c. 2023/24

d. 2024/25

e. 2025-to date

2. What is the age and gender of those mentioned in question 1?

3. If someone presented to the NHS with this condition, what support or treatment options are available?

4. How many people have been identified as having Compulsive Buying Disorder (CBD) alongside another mental health diagnosis? E.g OCD or ADHD.

5. What is the age and gender of those mentioned in question 4?

6. How many people have been identified as having a behavioural addiction e.g gambling, porn or gaming, during the following periods:

a. 2020/21

b. 2021/22

c. 2022/23

d. 2023/24

e. 2024/25

f. 2025-to date

7. What is the age and gender of those identified in question 6?

For questions 2, 5 and 7, I am not requesting any information that would identify patients

8. How many people have been identified as having a behavioural addiction which are partly (or wholly) linked to screen usage e.g gambling, porn or gaming, during the following periods:

a. 2020/21

b. 2021/22

c. 2022/23

d. 2023/24

e. 2024/25

f. 2025-to date

9. What is the age and gender of those identified above? (For this question, I am not requesting any information that would identify patients).

Response sent

1. The Trust is not commissioned to provide services for screening, assessment nor treatment of Compulsive Buying Disorder (CBD), nor (your initial questions no 4-7) –gambling, porn nor gaming as presenting nor co-presenting conditions.

ICD-11 and other diagnosis/discharge codes do not form part of the Trust’s specialist psychoanalytic and psychodynamic based approach and do not constitute mandatory data fields for patient discharge records.

Your request for information is not applicable to the Trust as we do not treat presenting or co-presenting conditions of behavioural addiction such as buying, gambling, porn or gaming as to which this information would apply.

1. In some instances we may work with patients who have these behavioural conditions as secondary presenting conditions, but there is no electronic data field dedicated to recording secondary presenting conditions on our EPR system (Electronic Patient Record)., so this data might only be held as text within the notes section of a patient’s electronic record, from which automated electronic reports cannot be run.

To manually extract secondary-presenting conditions data would entail a thorough reading of the clinical notes section of every patient’s EPR, which at around 15 minutes per record would take circa 250 hours per thousand files, which is far beyond the 18 hours appropriate limit, and therefore exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information section 12 – the cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit.

The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 has set the appropriate limit as £450 per request, based on a generic charge of £25 per hour to determine whether the Trust holds the information, to locate, and then to extract it). Section 12 of FOIA states that the authority (ie this Trust) is not obliged to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the costs of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.

This means that as the time required to interrogate cases of secondary presenting conditions of the behavioural addictions you specified above, falls outside the cost limit, is refused and exemption from disclosure under s12 of FOIA.