Preparing Those With Significant and Persistent Mental Illness to Quit Smoking

This study tests whether pre-cessation interventions known to be effective in the general population will increase acceptance of evidence-based treatment, engagement and compliance with that treatment and initial quitting success. One hundred and seventy two patients will be recruited from 13 Community Support Programs (CSPs). CSPs provide community based care to those diagnosed with persistent and serious mental illness. All participants will receive two group sessions (40 minutes each) modeled after "Kicking Butts", a group-based quitting preparation program used for the past four years in two Milwaukee CSP programs run by Wisconsin Community Services. Individuals will then be randomly assigned to the experimental and control conditions (n=86 each). Experimental subjects will receive four evidence-based preparatory interventions (motivational interviewing, smoking reduction, practice quit attempt, and pre-quit use of nicotine replacement medication) (25 - 30 minutes each). Attention control subjects will also receive four individual sessions of the same duration. However their individual sessions' content will be a discussion of the personal relevance of the group material and will not include any of the preparatory interventions. Data will be collected via brief surveys taken pre-intervention, at the end of the last individual session, and three months later and from a database provided by the Wisconsin Tobacco Quit Line (WTQL).