source: http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/health/view/1027455/1/.html
By Eveline Gan. TODAY | Posted: 29 December 2009 0808 hrs
SINGAPORE : Now that the high from the manic festive shopping has ebbed, you suddenly realised that your bank account has less money than your kid cousin's piggy bank.
Not a big deal, you tell yourself, as you laugh off your wallet-busting sprees.
But in some cases, compulsive spending can be a big deal, said experts TODAY spoke to. Take Geraldine (not her real name), a former shopping addict, for instance.
Her shopping sprees started out quite innocently. Whenever she felt stressed or unhappy, she would engage in "retail therapy". Over time, it spiralled out of control. The 28-year-old eventually maxed out six of her credit cards and racked up a debt of about S$80,000.
Compulsive spenders like Geraldine are not unheard of. Associate Professor Munidasa Winslow, a specialist in psychiatry at Raffles Hospital and whose clinical interest includes addiction problems, sees about one such case each month.
"Oniomania (the technical term for shopping addiction) tends to be compulsive, and there usually is a reason for it," he said.
Most oniomaniacs tend to always have "a larger presenting problem" such as marital issues, said Ms Jane Wong, a counsellor at My Counselling Room. She sees about five cases each year.
Over at Credit Counselling Singapore (CCS), assistant director Tan Huey Min said they are seeing more cases of bad debts as a result of overspending.
Of the 714 cases CSS counselled last year, 61.6 per cent cited overspending - as a result of shopping for branded goods or simply spending more than one can afford to - as one of the main causes of their indebtedness. In 2006, this group made up only 42.2 per cent of the total number of cases counselled.
Ms Tan added that most of them are between the age of 30 and 40, and owe an average of S$80,000 although their monthly take-home pay is only about S$2,500.
Assoc Prof Winslow explained that with this form of compulsive spending, the behaviour "is driven by the need to emotionally numb out unpleasant feelings or forget their problems".
I can't stop myself!
As with any kind of addiction behaviours, the spending binges often start out as "normal activities".
"But when it (shopping and spending) is taken to the extreme and becomes compulsive, and the person cannot stop despite knowing that they should, then it becomes more than a lifestyle. It affects both the person and those around them, just like other forms of addiction, such as gambling," said Assoc Prof Winslow.
While they may enjoy the adrenaline-pumping euphoria with each spending binge, the feeling never lasts long.
Typically, said Ms Wong, a compulsive spender would end up buying items they have no intention to use, and they can't explain why they need them.
"Even if they do explain (why they made the purchase), they may feel embarrassed and give irrational reasons."
At some point in time, the credit cards bills would also "start piling up somewhere in the closet", added Ms Wong.
While most oniomanics Assoc Prof Winslow sees are women, the condition is not unheard of in men.
One of the most serious cases Ms Tan has seen at CCS was a father of three. He was a Singapore permanent resident in his mid-30s and had a monthly take-home income of close to S$6,000.
He chalked up a debt of S$120,000 in a period of three years due to a lavish lifestyle of buying gifts for the family, fine-dining and offering financial help to relatives.
Breaking the cycle of addiction
Assoc Prof Winslow said it is important for spending addicts to break the cycle of addiction with professional help. This would also help identify and nip other accompanying mental problems, such as depression or anxiety, in the bud.
"Once you realise your shopping is going out of control, or you are spending to adjust your moods rather than buying rationally within your means, then it may be time to seek counsel," he said.
It is also important that the family does not bail out the person too quickly - as with gambling problems.
"If there are no consequences, the addiction behaviour repeats itself," said Assoc Prof Winslow.
For Geraldine, the road to recovery has been arduous.
Her psychiatrist has identified that her shopping addiction was her way of coping with stress from her hectic job and relationship problems.
She was given anti-depressants to help cope with the stress and improve her sleep. A credit counsellor also helped work out a financial repayment plan to control her spiralling credit card debt.
Although Geraldine is not yet debt-free, her debts are now manageable. Through the incident, she has also learnt healthier ways to deal with her emotions.
- TODAY
Monday, December 28, 2009
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Why we can never rest: a year in the life of Twitter
Source: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article6968440.ece
From The Sunday Times
December 27, 2009
ON June 15, our technicians told me to add a note to our website, writes Biz Stone, a co-founder of Twitter.
The note warned users of a planned maintenance session that meant our service would be inaccessible while we carried out an overdue system upgrade.
Immediately, we began to see a reaction in the form of tweets. Then came the emails. Then came the phone calls. Even the US State Department contacted us. The message was loud and clear: Twitter cannot rest while there is unrest in Iran.
However, if this maintenance was not done quickly, our operations team feared that the service might go down for days.
With the whole team on edge, my colleague Jessica Verrilli and I called our head of operations to convince him to do what was deemed extremely difficult if not impossible — reschedule the maintenance.
A few more phone calls and we had a consensus to postpone the work despite the risk. After all, this wouldn’t be the first time we had to ask our engineers to perform the impossible. In the space of a year, user accounts had grown by a factor of 10 while our 45-strong team remained crowded into a loft space in San Francisco’s industrial SoMa district.
The work was moved and the maintenance was eventually successful. In the days that followed, our service became inextricably linked to the Iranian election protests in hundreds of media reports on television, online, and in the newspapers.
Requests to discuss the tumult flooded in from everywhere but we did not engage. We chose instead to issue a simple statement on Twitter’s blog.
While it is our job to keep the service running, it was not the appropriate time or circumstance to put ourselves into the same conversation with people who were risking their lives on the streets of Tehran. The experience remains a humbling one that would define the year for Twitter and also underscore the motivation behind a decade of effort leading up to this point.
My co-founder Evan Williams and I have spent the past 10 years developing large systems that allow people to express themselves and communicate openly. We are united in our belief that software has the ability to augment humanity in productive and meaningful ways.
Although we are already a few years into our latest collaboration, this has been the year the world took note of a simple service that has profound promise. For us, it has been a year during which we realised that no matter how sophisticated the algorithms get, no matter how many machines we add to the network, our work is not about the triumph of technology, it is about the triumph of humanity.
Many people have assumed that Twitter is just another social network, some kind of micro-blogging service, or both. It can be these things but primarily Twitter serves as a real-time information network powered by people around the world discovering what’s happening and sharing the news. The Iranian election was the most discussed issue on Twitter in the final year of a decade defined by advancements in information access.
In the new year, Twitter will begin supporting a billion search queries a day. We will be delivering several billion tweets per hour to users around the world. These are figures we did not anticipate when we founded the company in 2007.
Looking back, the year is a blur, but that one summer morning remains fixed in my memory because it is a powerful reminder of why we find it meaningful to develop technology.
From The Sunday Times
December 27, 2009
ON June 15, our technicians told me to add a note to our website, writes Biz Stone, a co-founder of Twitter.
The note warned users of a planned maintenance session that meant our service would be inaccessible while we carried out an overdue system upgrade.
Immediately, we began to see a reaction in the form of tweets. Then came the emails. Then came the phone calls. Even the US State Department contacted us. The message was loud and clear: Twitter cannot rest while there is unrest in Iran.
However, if this maintenance was not done quickly, our operations team feared that the service might go down for days.
With the whole team on edge, my colleague Jessica Verrilli and I called our head of operations to convince him to do what was deemed extremely difficult if not impossible — reschedule the maintenance.
A few more phone calls and we had a consensus to postpone the work despite the risk. After all, this wouldn’t be the first time we had to ask our engineers to perform the impossible. In the space of a year, user accounts had grown by a factor of 10 while our 45-strong team remained crowded into a loft space in San Francisco’s industrial SoMa district.
The work was moved and the maintenance was eventually successful. In the days that followed, our service became inextricably linked to the Iranian election protests in hundreds of media reports on television, online, and in the newspapers.
Requests to discuss the tumult flooded in from everywhere but we did not engage. We chose instead to issue a simple statement on Twitter’s blog.
While it is our job to keep the service running, it was not the appropriate time or circumstance to put ourselves into the same conversation with people who were risking their lives on the streets of Tehran. The experience remains a humbling one that would define the year for Twitter and also underscore the motivation behind a decade of effort leading up to this point.
My co-founder Evan Williams and I have spent the past 10 years developing large systems that allow people to express themselves and communicate openly. We are united in our belief that software has the ability to augment humanity in productive and meaningful ways.
Although we are already a few years into our latest collaboration, this has been the year the world took note of a simple service that has profound promise. For us, it has been a year during which we realised that no matter how sophisticated the algorithms get, no matter how many machines we add to the network, our work is not about the triumph of technology, it is about the triumph of humanity.
Many people have assumed that Twitter is just another social network, some kind of micro-blogging service, or both. It can be these things but primarily Twitter serves as a real-time information network powered by people around the world discovering what’s happening and sharing the news. The Iranian election was the most discussed issue on Twitter in the final year of a decade defined by advancements in information access.
In the new year, Twitter will begin supporting a billion search queries a day. We will be delivering several billion tweets per hour to users around the world. These are figures we did not anticipate when we founded the company in 2007.
Looking back, the year is a blur, but that one summer morning remains fixed in my memory because it is a powerful reminder of why we find it meaningful to develop technology.
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