The movie "Confessions of a Shopaholic" opens this week. If you are the kind of person who likes to shop 'til you drop, you might want to skip the movie and read what follows in the company of a stiff drink. It turns out you're not well. Like compulsive eaters, you may have a medical disorder. The good news is: there's a cure.

In her book "I Shop, Therefore I Am: Compulsive Buying and the Search for Self", author April I. Benson argues that while extreme shopping is not yet recognised as a mental illness in the US, it soon will be.

"At best, shopping is an activity that can promote self-definition, even healing," Ms. Benson said last week. "But, like any behaviour, it can spin out of control. In extreme cases, there's no doubt it's a disorder. It can be as dangerous as drug or alcohol addiction.

"Suicides have been known to occur because of debt." Such behaviour - shopping until you're dropping, buying 'til you're crying, spending to the ending - has a medical name: oniomania. (That's not the same as onionmania, which is the medical term for believing that Bermuda is the centre of the universe.) The disease was first diagnosed more than 100 years ago by two disciples of Sigmund Freud, Eugene Bleuler and Emil Kraepelin. Bleuler wrote that, like kleptomania, oniomania is a form of "impulsive insanity".

The medical profession is not entirely united on the subject. Some in the shrinking community feel that, sometimes, buying a cigar is just buying a cigar. Dr. Jack Drescher, a Manhattan psychiatrist, believes that acute shopping is a matter of nature, rather than nurture. He points out that there are no shopaholics in poor countries.

One's reactions to all this are mixed. On the one hand, one recoils in horror from the consequences that will doubtless follow once medical science gets its gloved hands on extreme shopping. Guidelines will doubtless be introduced, followed by absurd punishments as those who consider their views the only acceptable norm - the lifestyle Fascists - take charge.

In this regard, one recalls an occasion when vandals kicked down my Dad's fencepost, which required nothing more than my having to put it back in again. No biggie. Then the Police called to offer counselling. The British rules on crime response no longer involve catching criminals, but are focussed on making victims feel whole, respectively a bad idea and a good idea, depending on the enormity of the crime.

I explained to the concerned bluebottle that I was strong and would somehow overcome the psychological damage caused by the post having been knocked over, although, in order not to hurt his feelings, I acknowledged that life would never again taste as sweet. On the other hand, as a smoker, a certain sense of schadenfreude overcomes one whenever the slightly bizarre behaviour of others is found to be unhealthy and then punished in the name of helping them.

Just last week, authorities in California persuaded legislators in a town called Belmont to ban people from smoking in their own homes if they share a floor or ceiling with anyone else's home. Apparently, the feeble-minded nitwits - sorry, caring professionals - who pass laws in that part of the world have concluded that smoke can seep through floors and ceilings. Home of the brave? Land of the free? Don't make me laugh.

The British have criminalised smoking on the outdoor balcony of any building with more than one balcony, presumably in case the smoke wafts its way to California and then seeps though brick walls into other people's apartments.

(Sidebar: It's worse at Gatwick Airport, as all you smokers will know if you've ever landed there and headed outdoors for a quick puff. An ominous sign reads: "No smoking outside the airport". Hey, my apartment is outside the airport. So is Bermuda.) As to this business of self-definition through bashing the old credit card, some of us believe that you already are whoever you are, no matter how many new hats you buy. Obviously, spending yourself to death is a bad idea. But if extreme shoppers are clinically barmy, isn't anyone who kills someone also round the twist and therefore not guilty by reason of insanity? And aren't advertisers guilty of being accomplices? And what of the shop that sells goods to nutty shopaholics? Or cigarettes to smokers? These are deep waters.

The cure for oniomania is simplicity itself: shop a bit less. Tear up the credit cards. Just say no. Use that tiny, walnut-sized object rolling around in your head - what we in the medical fraternity call your brain - and think before you go shopping. Do social work instead. Mentor some kiddies. Read a book. Do anything rather than head into Hamilton in search of that new frock. Or, since men don't suffer from oniomania, consider having what we used to insensitively call a sex change, now known as gender reallocation. If that sounds a little extreme, you're already on the road to recovery.

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Received an e-mail about my comments on Google last week, from which we learn two things: (1) I'm glad I don't own Google shares and (2) apparently, I'm a very bad person.

The reader wrote: "While I agree that lowering strike price on options is dirty pool, your assumption (is) that the worker bees who are thus rewarded are those responsible for the 60 percent reduction in share price. Such catastrophes are the result of incompetent management. Now, it could be that management should have made 60 percent of staff redundant in order to protect shareholders. But that assumes that shareholders are the only actors of value.

"That assumption is the prime cause of our global depression (yes, that's what it is; you can cite me as the first to understand the situation). Like it or not, economic depression is the result of increasing income inequality, a fact not admitted to by the right-wing and its fellow travellers. To the extent that Schmidt chose to protect some worker bees, he is protecting overall economic health. To do otherwise is to further enrich the wealthy, increase the state of income inequality, and prolong the depression.

"For the true right-wing zealots, there is never economic depression, only righteous Social Darwinism; the poor deserve to starve to death.

"Be careful what you wish for."

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The debate on the indefinite article preceding words starting with the letter "h" has raged up and down Bermuda for weeks now. I have been forced to carry out research into the matter and have come across the definitive answer.

From Fowler's Modern English Usage: "A" is used before all consonants except silent "h" (a history, an hour); "an" was formerly used before an unaccented syllable beginning with "h" and is still often seen and heard (an historian; an hotel; an hysterical scene; an hereditary title; an habitual offender).

Fowler says that what you choose to do in the latter case is essentially up to you; what matters is consistency.

There we 'ave it.