Harvard medical researchers have concluded that Americans with mental illness are nearly twice as likely to smoke cigarettes as people with no mental illness. The study, appearing in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) (jama.ama-assn.org...), finds 41 percent of people with mental illness are smokers compared to 22.5 percent of people who have never been mentally ill. The article also states that the mentally ill smoke more heavily than others.

Extrapolating their results to the U.S. population, the researchers estimate that people with diagnosable mental illness comprise nearly 45 percent of the total tobacco market in the U.S.

Said Harvard study author Lasser: “Perhaps mental illness causes smoking by making people more vulnerable to tobacco advertising or nicotine addiction; however, other studies have called the direction of causality into question, suggesting that smoking may cause mental illness and, our findings are certainly compatible with that as well.”
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