The Globe and Mail

Date: March 30, 2003

Word count: 1289

Subject: Dromomania

By: Kira Vermond

On a mid-January day earlier this year, Deborah Knuckey, a personal finance writer in Washington DC, was sorting through papers in her home office when she spotted a brochure hiding under a pile. She picked it up -- and her heart began to race.

Words jumped out at her. Canadian arctic. Baffin Island. Polar expedition training course. Royal Geographical Society. Only eight spots open.

Before she could stop herself Ms. Knuckey wrote a cheque for $2,000 Canadian and booked a flight. A couple of weeks later she was setting up base camp on the frozen sea ice of Frobisher Bay, 100 km south of the Arctic Circle on Baffin Island.

"That wasn't impulsive. I planned it all of two weeks in advance," she says, deadpanning.

Ms. Knuckey would need five sets of fingers and toes to be able to count on digits how many countries she has visited in the last two decades. From the first time she said goodbye to her native Australia and backpacked around Indonesia at 18, she has spent months of each year traveling the globe. Last year alone she spent three weeks in Patagonia, two months in Vanuatu and New Caledonia and a couple of weeks in India. This after she swore she'd settle down and focus on her life at home.

"Sometimes it really does feel compulsive. It's just itchy," she says.

Could it be she has a mild case of dromomania, the medical term for an impulsive urge to travel? Although dromomania is hardly a household word -- even amongst psychiatrists -- cases of the impulse control disorder have been documented in the past century both in adults and children.

True dromomaniacs are obsessed with travel and are always planning their next trip or making sudden preparations to flee. Like a gambler or arsonist, they feel a build-up of pressure and anxiety that is only satiated once a certain task is performed. In a dromomaniac's case, when they have bought their ticket and their plane is in the air. Once back home the cycle begins again.

There are other similar documented manias such as drapetomania, the urge to wander away from home, even one in which sufferers compulsively cross borders. In the early twentieth century, a group of French psychologists and psychiatrists made various diagnosis about Jesus. One of their findings? Jesus had dromomania, evident from his frequent traveling from Nazareth. (To be fair, this same group also said he was an egocentric maniac and called him deranged and amoral.)

But according to Dr. Joan Lakin-Marantz, a psychotherapist in New York and author of Compulsions: How to stop doing what you don't want to do, dromomania is no laughing matter. She has treated patients with the condition and says people who have it are constantly running away from the fear and grief of being rejected and alone.

"In travelling, there's a distraction. They become involved in the minutia of travel -- buying the tickets, packing their bags and planning where to go. It's distraction against the pain of loneliness," she says.

In many ways compulsive travelling is a form of self-medication. By creating a frenzy before heading out the door, dromomaniacs can leave real life behind and focus on a fantasy. The fantasy might include how warm and friendly people they meet will be at the destination and how they will immediately fit in and make friends.

But after a while on the road, the shine rubs off.

"They begin to realize that it's probably going to be very similar to the way it was. They certainly don't have any more skills in relating than they had before," she says.

That's not to say that regular old travel bugs have dromomania, however. Dr. Robert Van Rekum, a Toronto-based psychiatrist at Baycrest Centre and assistant professor at the University of Toronto's department of psychiatry, says unless there are other psychiatric issues, chances are most travel junkies simply like to get away and explore.

"There's a distinction between having a disorder and just travelling a lot. Human behaviour is normal until it affects that person's well-being or the well-being of others around them," he maintains, saying this is the criterion psychiatrists use when determining whether someone has a personality disorder.

The compulsive need to label and treat every human eccentricity has been under attack in recent years, but there are benefits to the practice when doctors are trying to establish causation, prognosis and diagnosis for truly ill patients. Still there are problems with calling the human condition "a disorder" says Howard Bloom, author of Global Brain: The evolution of mass mind from the big bang to the 21^st century. He maintains obsessive nomadic impulses have done far more good than bad for us as a species.

"An impulse control disorder? But it's not! It's the opposite. That's crazy," he says. "Without this we wouldn't be human. Without this we would never have achieved what we have achieved."

He should know. While Mr. Bloom has lived in the same Brooklyn brownstone for 30 years, his new wife has never been one to stay in one place fore more than three years. Diane Petryk-Bloom likes to treat her life as one big working holiday. She has moved to New Zealand for 15-months, stayed a month in Croatia and has lived in towns all over the U.S. She admits she is always looking at lists of best places to live and even completed paperwork to get her Canadian citizenship (her mother was from Toronto) a few years ago in hopes of moving to Nova Scotia one day.

Even though she settled down with her husband a little over a year ago, Ms. Petryk-Bloom says she still plans on taking off by herself from time to time.

"I think I'm a little out of the norm. I don't know if it's a mania, but I know that whenever I relocate and I get a new job, half of my mind is saying how am I going to eventually work my way out of this?" she says.

Constantly looking for paradise on earth, as she calls it, has advantages and curses.

On one hand, she and her 12-year-old son have been fortunate to live in some of the most beautiful surroundings and made friends all around the country. On the other hand the consequences of so much travel include lack of work security and seniority, saying goodbye to friends and the sheer expense of moving -- usually $4,000 or $5,000 a shot.

"Financially, you're better off not having this," she says.

Ms. Knuckey, however, has figured out a way to pay for her passion. One of the reasons she says she writes about personal finance is because she's often asked how she manages to swing the long and impulsive journeys on a writer's salary.

For starters she says she drives an older car to avoid having to make large payments on a newer model. She also bought a three-unit building and her tenants pay the mortgage while she lives for free in one of the apartments. Ms. Knuckey also tries to travel for work as often as possible so it's on another company's dime. And she buys everything on a frequent flyer credit card, then pays it off at the end of each month. By racking up points she rarely has to pay for airfare.

It's all about being creative -- and having priorities.

But besides one more trip to Italy scheduled for June, she thinks she's finally got the travelling bug out of her system. At least until the next tempting travel brochure comes along.

"I find I'm less interested in travel now and more interested in the internal journeys," she claims. "But then again, I said that last September and ended up going to India."

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