Smoking may be a sign of psychiatric illness, according to a new UK report, which found a third of smokers to have mental disorders.
According to the report, almost one in three cigarettes consumed in UK today is smoked by someone with a mental disorder.
When people with drug and alcohol problems are included, the proportion is even higher, the report published by the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Psychiatrists found.
The reason being that smoking rates have more than halved over the past 50 years, but the decline has not happened equally in all parts of society,'The Independent' reported.
"Smoking is increasingly becoming the domain of the most disadvantaged: the poor, homeless, imprisoned and those with mental disorder. This is a damning indictment of UK public health policy and clinical service provision," the report said.
The report further warned that of the ten million smokers in UK, up to three million have a mental disorder, up to two million have been prescribed a psychoactive drug in the past year and approaching one million have longstanding [mental] disease.
While smoking rates among the general public have fallen dramatically, from 56 per cent in men and 42 per cent in women in the early 1960s to 21 per cent in both sexes today, they have hardly changed among people with mental disorders and remain at over 40 per cent.
Persuading people with mental disorders to give up smoking was a major challenge. But so was identifying smokers who might need psychiatric treatment, Stephen Spiro, deputy chair of the British Lung Foundation, said.
