The Daily Novel

BBC’s Radio Four programme, All in the Mind, raised a really important issue just now. How are the 70 per cent (yes, it is 70 per cent) of mental health patients who smoke going to cope from next July when all mental health units will have to ban smoking. The programme was disappointing. Because it strived for balance, and representing several points of view. But what was needed was a full-half-hour answering a different question.

Why is it that 70 per cent of mental health patients smoke? Why is it that a majority of those who work in mental health wards are against banning patients from smoking and using their valuable time helping them to give up?

The answer is that smoking helps them to deal with their mental health problems. There are several research studies which have shown this. I have read two or three myself in relation to depression. But it is no good me quoting from them because in the current climate, almost no-one wants to know that smoking does have some beneficial effects. And journalists, instead of fighting the corner of this new oppressed minority which is being created, turn away and write about something which is more in tune with the current fashions.

And I can tell you, from my own personal experence, that if the smoking ban had been in force when I was in the Royal Free two years ago, my stay would have cost the national health service (which means you, readers, the taxpayers) at least another full month’s full board and treatment.

I know this because I know the effect on my mental health, of those periods in which I have given up. I also know what happens when I have to go for long periods without cigarettes, on plane journeys, train journeys, etc.

All in the Mind, gave space to a new organisation which is helping mental health patients to give up. What they should be doing is helping them to find ways of carrying on smoking. Smoking is not a symtom of their mental illness. It is a powerful drug, which like the pills which are thrust down their throats, has a chemical effect, which helps them to deal with the minds they were born with.

Of course, cancer may catch up with them one day. But meanwhile they can get by, even work productively, by the drug of their choice.

When people try and convince them that their own choices are ‘wrong’, implicitly ‘mad’, it does not help.

In conclusion, I write this in the awareness that the majority of the readers of my blog may be people who have never smoked. To them I will say that what the research shows is that there is a clear difference between social smokers and those smokers who are addicts. That is why Britain, following America and Australia, has been able to move in the space of a mere fifty years from a society in which almost all men smoked to a society in which most middle class white men mostly do not smoke. Because the social smokers can give up with no more difficulty than abandoning any other ingrained habity The addict smoker, by contrast, faces the same trauma as the heroin addict and the alcholic.

How to dent the conventional wisdom of the times, is not easy, but I have found the url for this film, which I have not seen. But let me quote one sentence of the publicity.

The result is a film that is neither pro- nor anti-tobacco, giving a clear view of spin-happy American society with a wink and a laugh.

Our current smoking policy in Britain and Australia is dictated by the lead given by the Americans. America has been moving resolutely for some years now against smoking, despite the fact that American companies still make a lot of the cigarettes (and in my view the best ones). Marxists and anyone left of centre please note. American politics is not dictated by big business. There are other imperatives. The desire to do good. The Puritanical streak. The spirit which led America to seek to impose abolition of booze, although that also involved a policy hated by the big and powerful companies making their profits from it.

The smoking debate is not only about the civil liberties of the few remaining smokers. It overlaps with the mental health issues. Is our current favoured pill treatment satisfactory, when it is clearly not ‘curing’ mental health patients? Should we not listen to what they have to say? They cost us a lot of money. And current policies are not helping to integrate them into society.