Phillip,

You're doing great. Sorry about the financial news. As for the cigarettes, look for NAMI (membership in this organization must be criminilized), TAC, and big pharma to manipulate the statistics like it does with suicide and murder, in other words, every one who murders or commits suicide is retroactiviely diagnosed as severely mentally ill, and now, if you smoke, you'll get the label of smi, it's proof (unless of course you're in NAMI, or a mental health professional, then you're just smoking because of the pain caused to you be other people's mental illnesses).

.."it's just life in its omnipresent screwiness."

I think you could market that phrase on mugs, shirts and wall plaques.

"But I prefer sucking it up and moving forward on my own terms to allowing anyone to turn me into a victim, or to their telling me, "Oooh, poor baby, you're depressed, you're upset. Mental illness is very dangerous, please see your health care provider." Nah, folks it's just life in its omnipresent screwiness. I'll take my life meds-free and my side-effects all natural, thanks."
when I went off medications I was amased how real my emotions had become and then horrified how the medical community insisted and fought with me to go back on medications and ECT to stop these emotions. The hardest part of my recovery was the doctors. I say doctors because I didn't tell family and friends I had stopped the medications, I'm sure there would have been a fight there too had they known. It's unbelieveable how the system is set up to make you a victim and keep you a victim. No matter how bad or how stressed I may feel at times now, I much prefer to live my life with emotions and experience life as it comes. The only emotions I felt while on medications were hopelessness, sucide and doom which were always an upward battle with no end in sight. Now when "life" comes up, I can find ways to deal with it. Something that just wasn't possible on medications. I'm with you Philip, I'll take life's side effects naturally! Maybe in 70 or 80 years, this will become the "norm" again!

I think this is very plausible, depending on who is included in the mental illness category. I have read some of the scholarly research on this and they include a very broad range of disorders....major depressions, bipolar disorder, phobias, generalized anxiety disorder, substance dependence (I think it includes nicotine dependence!),conduct disorder, schizophrenia, and a few more.

But assuming it is just schizophrenia and Bipolar, if you use the info in the article and the total U.S. population figure of about 300,000,000 to try to estimate the number of mentally ill people given the smoking percentages given, it will come out to close to the 9 million number you have, depending on what figure you use for the % of all mentally ill who smoke.

um sure mark. if you are naive enough to buy into the 50 percent of america is mentally ill estimate propounded by kessler and other morons at harvard, then it might add up. i attacked this claim and smoking and mental illness when it first came out and i am thrilled to see the nanny staters/social controllers buy into once again. i really want them to declare smoking a form of insanity so we can see them for what they are.

Re: the Jonah Lehrer link, and reading some comments there left by ppl. with experience working inside psych wards or group homes, and commenting on how smoking is often only able way to pass time?

Here's the flipside to that: at each psych ward and group home Ive been inside[which are many]I also observed most of the staff smoke too, and it's how they pass time on their own breaks.

That thread, those comments, jaysus. You nailed it, Stephany, it's nothing but the Other mentality, giving them zero awareness, and a complete inability to see what's in front of them.