Mission Statement :

Stopping Overshopping, LLC, exists to alleviate the suffering, particularly to individuals, caused by compulsive buying. We work towards:

• raising public awareness about overshopping and compulsive buying;
• promoting consumer advocacy initiatives;
• providing overshoppers with effective help and supporting them in their recovery work; and
• training therapists and related professionals to help overshoppers and the people who love them.

About Dr. Benson:

April Lane Benson, Ph.D., is a nationally known psychologist who specializes in the treatment of compulsive buying disorder. She has been in private practice in New York City for over 25 years. Dr. Benson graduated cum laude from Barnard College, Columbia University, and has earned a Master of Science in Counseling Psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from Ferkauf Graduate School, Yeshiva University. She holds post-graduate certificates in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis from the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy, in the treatment of eating disorders from the Center for the Study of Anorexia and Bulimia, and in Spirituality and Psychotherapy from the Blanton-Peale Institute for Pastoral Counseling. Co-founder of the Center for the Study of Anorexia and Bulimia, the oldest outpatient eating disorders clinic in New York, Dr. Benson is also a faculty member, supervisor, and executive committee member there. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy.

I Shop, Therefore I Am: Compulsive Buying and the Search for Self (Aronson, 2000), Dr. Benson's first book, takes a multidisciplinary approach to the problem of compulsive buying. It includes contributions from the fields of sociology, consumer behavior, marketing, community education, psychology, and psychiatry.

Dr. Benson's new book, To Buy or Not to Buy (Trumpeter Books, 2008), is a comprehensive program for stopping overshopping, based upon the successful research-based treatment that she and her colleagues developed and refined over the past ten years.

"Treatment of Compulsive Buying" her co-authored chapter in Addictions: A Practical Handbook (Wiley, 2004), reviews the forms of treatment that are currently available for compulsive buying disorder and suggests the most effective way to formulate a treatment plan. "Compulsive Buying: Cultural Contributors and Consequences" is another chapter she's co-authored, which will be published in late 2009 in Impulse Control Disorders by Cambridge University Press. She's recently written a chapter that is a case report, to be included in Compulsive Buying: Clinical Foundations and Treatment, scheduled for publication by Routledge Publishing Company in 2010.

Dr. Benson has appeared widely in the media, including What Would Jesus Buy?, a documentary about overconsumption in America during the holidays and she will appear in early December, 2009 in an episode of "The Secret Lives of Women" about shopaholics, for the Women's Entertainment Network. For upcoming media, click here. Her most recent TV appearances were on "CNN," "Good Morning America," "The Today Show," "CBS Evening News," "ABC News Now," and "BBC World Business Report." Recent radio appearances include "Marc Sussman's Money Messages" on Air America, "The Peter Walsh Show" on Oprah and Friends Radio, "The Jean Chatzky Show" on Oprah and Friends Radio, "Body and Soul" on NPR in Sweden, "the Business Shrink," "Your Turn," "Money Scope," and "Love and Money" on XM Satellite radio. Quoted in The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Toronto Star, she has also been referenced in Money Magazine, Kiplinger Personal Finance, Simple Living, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Harper's Bazaar, Redbook, Marie Claire, and a variety of internet publications.For an online press kit, click here.

Dr. Benson has taught therapists at a number of postgraduate institutes and college counseling centers about compulsive buying and it's treatment. Recently, she conducts 4-session didactic courses for therapist and 12-session trainings in the comprehensive treatment model that she and her colleagues have develeoped. For details, click here. Dr. Benson also teaches a course online, I Shop, Therefore I Am: Understanding and Treating Compulsive Buying. For details go to www.PsyBC.com.

Maintaining a private practice in New York City, Dr. Benson and her associates Ms. Marcela Torres, and Dr. Kathleen Galek, see individual compulsive buyers and work with small groups in the New York metropolitan area. They also provide telephone coaching, using the same program, with overshoppers outside of the New York metropolitan area. For more details, go to:
http://www.stoppingovershopping.com/shopping_therapy.htm

The Staff:

Marcela Torres, MSW graduated from the Universidad de Los Andes, in Bogotá, Colombia, in 2002 with a degree in psychology. She did clinical work at Horus, an innovative outpatient clinic and day treatment center for clients with eating disorders, co-leading support groups and researching comorbidity between eating disorders and obsessive compulsive disorders. At Fundación Omega, a non-profit organization in Bogotá, she worked as a grief counselor for widows and orphans and co-led support groups in their pioneering bereavement counseling programs.

During the five years she has been in New York, Marcela has helped with the writing and editing of the Stopping Overshopping manual and co-facilitated the Stopping Overshopping group program. She also worked for a year and a half with Project Liberty in New York City as a Crisis Counselor, helping people to cope after the September 11th terrorist attacks. Most recently, she’s been working with families in a preventive services program through the Children’s Aid Society, providing clinical and case management services to prevent foster care placement. Marcela has studied the treatment of trauma at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and taken seminars in eating disorders treatment, dialectical behavior therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy at the Center for the Study of Anorexia and Bulimia in New York City. Marcela was a trainee at the Ackerman Institute for Family Therapy for two years, and graduated with an MSW from the Hunter College School of Social Work in January, 2008.

Kathleen Galek, Ph.D. received her doctorate in Clinical Psychology from Columbia University and her MA in Clinical and Research Psychology from New York University. An individual, group, and couples therapist for more than ten years, she specializes in eating disorders, couple communication, compulsive shopping, and spirituality. Kathleen has worked with patients suffering from a variety of medical problems, including Parkinson's, HIV/AIDS, Alzheimer's, heart attack, and severe stroke. At the NYU Medical Center, where she spent four years as a clinician and researcher, she studied the impact of couple communication on physical health and co-facilitated workshops on improving couple intimacy. She has also designed and co-facilitated a workshop on couple communication at the Makor/Steinhardt Center of the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.

In her current position as researcher and writer at the HealthCare Chaplaincy, Kathleen focuses on the integration of spirituality into therapeutic relationships. She has written and edited material for the Stopping Overshopping group program, completed a 14-session training in the Stopping Overshopping model, worked with individual overshopping clients, and will co-lead the Fall, 2009 telephone coaching group with April Benson. Dr. Galek is the principal investigator of a multi-site study of compulsive eating, compulsive buying, and meaning in life, which is currently being prepared for publication. The study was conducted at Brooklyn College, in New York, Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City, Utah, and at Universidad de San Buenaventura in Colombia, South America.

Sarah L. Weinberger-Litman earned a PhD in Experimental Health Psychology from the City University of New York. Her early graduate work focused on the impact of psychosocial stress on health and her later research examined sociocultural influences on disordered eating behavior among Jewish women. She recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in behavioral medicine at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, in the department of Cancer Prevention and Control. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Spears Research Institute in NYC, where she studies spiritual and religious influences on addictive behaviors. She is the associate producer of “Hungry to be Heard,” a documentary about eating disorders in the Orthodox Jewish community. She is participating in research on the Stopping Overshopping model with Dr. April Benson  and Dr. Kathleen Galek and will be co-leading an educational coaching group this spring.

Margaret Massimo is the administrative intern for Stopping Overshopping, LLC. Currently a full time student at Georgetown University, Margaret is pursuing a major in Psychology, with double minors in Mathematics and Government.

She has been working with Dr. Benson and Stopping Overshopping since August of 2008, handling networking, blogging, technology and other administrative tasks.