Why Do Schizophrenics Smoke Cigarettes?

For health care workers in psychiatric hospitals, it is no secret: one of the major issues confronting psychiatric facilities seeking to institute blanket no-smoking policies concerns chronic inpatients with schizophrenia. Patients with schizophrenia are almost always heavy cigarette smokers, given a choice. As Edward Lyon wrote in an analysis of studies and surveys performed throughout the 1990s: “Many patients in psychiatric hospitals would smoke two, three, or even four packs of cigarettes a day if an unlimited supply of cigarettes were available.”