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That Schizophrenia patients smoke a lot is well known. I guess this explains it. The other weird Schizophrenia fact is that blind people are never Schizophrenic. Congenital Blindness, that is. Poking your eyes out won't cure Schizophrenia once you have it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, its the same thing in prisons, so I always assumed its boredom/stress relief as the explanation for chain smoking.
Or it indicates that prisons also contain many mentally ill inmates...
It won't really be a surprise, when science learns that most "harmful addictive" substances can improve aspects of brain function for many people.
Isn't it more the delivery mechanism than the drug itself?
Can anyone with access to the paper give a few technical details? The abstract mentions "Chronic nicotine administration" does this mean the nicotine dosage is high enough to not be a viable basis for treatment? The linked article claims that this could be a basis for new drug research, which sounds exciting, but how much do we already know about drugs that affect the nicotinic receptors?
It won't really be a surprise, when science learns that most "harmful addictive" substances can improve aspects of brain function for many people.
Isn't it more the delivery mechanism than the drug itself?
For those who have seen severe mental illness up close, this is not surprising in the least. Many, many people with schizophrenia or other disorders characterized by psychosis self-medicate heavily with cigarettes. Huddled masses of patients smoking outside are fixtures of most psychiatric treatment facilities.
Original DOI link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nm.4274 Edit: Please read abandonliberty's comment below before reading mine. I didn't properly elucidate the position on the harms v. benefits tradeoff (net harm) the way abandonliberty did. My own opinion: it wouldn't be terribly surprising to see many harmful substances only be harmful to a majority subset of a population space, though that's why the scheduling system (…
Unfortunately drug schedules aren't evidence based, and there's no evidence based measurement for "potential for abuse" in use by the DEA or FDA.