 "Photo: Brendan McInerney / Associate Photography Editor")
By Dmitry Sheynin
Staff Writer
Psychiatric facilities are among the last types of health service providers lacking a ban on smoking, said Dr. Jill Williams, director of the Division of Addiction Psychiatry and Mental Health Tobacco Services at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
"Programs that treat behavioral health problems, such as depression or schizophrenia, are the only remaining sector of health care that fail to systematically help patients quit smoking," she said in an article in the Feb. 6 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Among individuals with serious mental illness, who already have an average life span of 25 years less than the general population, cardiovascular or heart diseases are the leading causes of death, she said.
Most hospitals already have programs for helping smokers, and mental care facilities have an added impetus to promote a smoke-free environment, Williams said.
"Studies of psychiatric hospitals becoming tobacco-free report fewer behavioral problems and less violence after policies take effect," she said. "Facilities that [were smoke-free] indicated improved patient health, cleaner indoor environments and hospital grounds, increases in staff satisfaction and more time to provide treatment."
Tobacco dependence treatment was necessary to a patient's full mental recovery, and restrictions on smoking were a positive health policy in general, Williams said.
"If you are going to be a patient in one of these hospitals, you would be restricted from smoking as long as you're in this environment," she said. "That might sound harsh, but that's the way a lot of medical care facilities are these days."
Although smoking-related illness is still the number one cause of death in the United States, not everyone in the psychiatric field is convinced that banning cigarettes in hospitals is a good idea.
Ron Honberg, a spokesman for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said psychiatric patients are extremely vulnerable when they go to hospitals, and forcing them to quit could be counterproductive.
"At this point in time, we have no confidence that smoking bans are going to serve the best interests of patients," he said in an interview on National Public Radio. "We are worried it's going to make people sicker, [and] it's going to make recovery that much more difficult."
Patients might close themselves off to the possibility of mental care as a result of a smoking ban, Honberg said.
"[Eliminating tobacco use] is in line with national trends that call for mental health care to be more oriented toward wellness and recovery," said Jennifer Forbes, the communications and public affairs coordinator for Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
Although UMDNJ itself is not a smoke-free campus, many health care institutions and universities, including Rutgers, have considered banning tobacco as part of an overall policy of wellness, Williams said.
"Colleges and universities are looking at these kinds of things to help students and to, frankly, make it more difficult to smoke," she said.
The University is not currently planning to institute a smoking ban, Williams said.
