I believe it was 2 years ago, in one of my home visits that I did within community psychiatric treatment in our Psychiatric Clinic. I remember that a patient said to me: “It is the only thing I have in this life – the cigarettes and coffee”. I felt sorry for him and his “voices” “stood out” more than his “smokers cough”. I just said to him “try to reduce a bit” (he was smoking 3 package of cigarettes per day!) and then put my efforts in explaining how important is for him to take his medication regularly, about schizophrenia symptoms and so on.

However later, he made me contemplate the status quo of mental health. It seems that with in mental health, professionals tend to see just one side of the coin. We are quite satisfied with our work when patients are calm, do not have delusions, are not suicidal et cetera. We don’t care about their smoking.