Smoking Privileges: Psychiatry, the Mentally Ill, and the Tobacco Industry in America

Current public health literature suggests that the mentally ill may represent as much as half of the smokers in America. In Smoking Privileges, Laura D. Hirshbein highlights the complex problem of mentally ill smokers, placing it in the context of changes in psychiatry, in the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries, and in the experience of mental illness over the last century.

Hirshbein, a medical historian and clinical psychiatrist, first shows how cigarettes functioned in the old system o...