Mental Health Blogs

Via If You’re Going Through Hell Keep Going comes news that the State of New Jersey has decreed that patients–and presumably employees–will no longer be allowed to smoke on the grounds of its state psychiatric hospitals. It’s a move that strikes me as unfair on a number of grounds and, if Washington State’s experience with a similar ban at its state hospitals is any guide, it’s a move that will eventually be reversed.

While I get the state’s point that smoking isn’t healthy for patients, for it to make the argument (and it is) about health improvement in a patient population it’s already slamming with antipsychotics is assbackwards. Besides, most state hospitals I know of in the US are fairly restrictive on how long patients are allowed outside of their buildings (often patients are restricted to 30 minutes a day of outdoors time), so it’s not like too, too many patients were outside blazing through a pack of Camels all day. I bet most patients were smoking perhaps a few cigarettes a day, particularly because state hospital patients are typically medicated to the gills and sleep a lot (at least in my experience). Add that to the fact that this represents one more freedom taken away from a group of people who’ve lost their freedom of movement, their freedom of association (their freedom to socialize with other patients in a manner of their choosing) and many of their rights to control what goes into their own bodies and I just get pissed off on their behalf.

The Nanny Statists behind this move are chasing a non-problem. Unless they’ve suddenly made Zyprexa safer.

IYGTHKG has plenty of similar thoughts on her post on the matter.

I wrote about Washington State’s ban on smoking at state hospitals in 2007:

“[I]n 2004, Western State Hospital here in Washington State took away psych patients’ rights to smoke cigarettes outdoors on their 30-minute a day breaks from the wards. The hospital’s CEO told me it was for the patients’ “own good.” I told him that he was taking away one of the patients’ few pleasures and that I considered it mean, given the fact that the patients are mostly schizophrenics who are so doped up that whatever visceral joy they get from smoking ought to be granted to them in the name of their psychological health.”

The smoking ban was lifted in 2005.

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3. NY State Discriminated Against Mentally Ill In Adult Homes
4. Researchers Ignore Problems With Meds In Early Deaths, Blame Smoking, No Exercise
5. Lilly Settles Zyprexa Lawsuit With State Of West Virginia