Behavioral Health and Quitting Smoking

Welcome to the site dedicated to helping healthcare providers assist their behavioral-health patients with quitting smoking, chewing or vaping tobacco.

• We understand you’re overwhelmed, time is precious, and clients vary in confidence and readiness to quit. Your peers are successfully treating tobacco use in a reasonable amount of time, and clients are quitting.

• How do they do it? Here you’ll find strategies and tips to help your patients succeed, straight from the therapists, administrators, and clients who have done it.
• You’ll learn to treat tobacco use without taking too much of your time. In fact, studies show quitting smoking helps with other challenges you are treating every day. It’s a force multiplier.
  • More than 260 Health Professionals Take New Online Course on the ‘Bucket Approach’
  • So don’t get left behind – get your FREE CE credit and help your patients quit. It will change their lives.

Chapter 75 Update

Evidence Base for Helping Your Patients Quit Tobacco

• A meta-analysis in the journal Addiction found people with mental illness are motivated to quit smoking. In fact, more than half of people with behavioral-health diagnoses contemplated quitting within the last six months. (Siru et al, Addiction, May 2009)
• More behavioral health patients will die from tobacco use than from their behavioral health issues–and they’ll die from tobacco sooner. It’s time to take action

Sources: McClave et al., AJPH, 2010 and *Weinberger, et. al., ACER, 2018.

• “I challenge all deliveries of care: CSPs, residential, private psychotherapy, and those programs who treat the most vulnerable, who may want to focus on other issues, to think about how they can address tobacco and to adopt a zero-tolerance policy.” ~William Fry, Director, Columbia St. Mary’s Behavioral Health
  • What’s YOUR opinion? Click here to share
• Explore A TIME TO LEAD – Second Edition, the most compelling case for integrating tobacco treatment in our behavioral health programs, presented by some of America’s leading tobacco addiction and mental health experts.
• The WiNTiP Decade: What the Wisconsin Nicotine Treatment Integration Project (WiNTiP) has accomplished in its first 10 years, and what challenges remain to help behavioral health patients quit smoking, chewing, and vaping.
• Webinar: Recovery-Oriented Tobacco Interventions in Addiction Services
  • Slides
• It’s all part of the Wisconsin Nicotine Treatment Integration Project (WiNTiP).