Development of a Scalable Intervention to Improve Smoking Cessation in Persons With Serious Mental Illness

Persons with serious mental illness (SMI, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, recurrent depression) are a socioeconomically disadvantaged group and die on average 10-15 years earlier than those in the general population, many from cancer. The prevalence of smoking in persons with SMI is approximately 3 times that in the general population; smoking is the is the strongest risk factor for elevated mortality in this population. Psychiatric inpatient admissions are common in SMI and the hospital is an optimal place to provide smoking cessation services. All patients are abstinent while in the hospital. The key challenge is how to continue to engage these patients in cessation services to support continued abstinence. While most receive refer to telephone quitline at discharge, quitlines are not as effective with SMI smokers and almost all return to smoking. Introducing hospitalized SMI patients to cessation services that can be easily accessed when they leave the hospital offers the best chance of converting initial abstinence into sustained abstinence post-discharge. A digital intervention that incorporates web-delivered evidence-based smoking cessation practices, digital coaching, and mobile text messaging is a scalable and sustainable way to bridge the inpatient to outpatient gap in cessation services. Currently there is no digital cessation program that addresses the needs of SMI smokers. The investigators propose to adapt a digital intervention both to the needs of SMI smokers and to being introduced in the inpatient psychiatric setting through a collaboration between experts in SMI and the Truth Initiative, a pre-eminent tobacco control organization. The investigators will build upon a well-established, evidence-based, cessation website, BecomeAnEX.org (EX), that offers individualized quit plans, an active social community, text and email messaging support, and digital coaching. Integrating input from different stakeholders, the investigators will develop adaptations so that EX components and language are in line with principles of mental health recovery and will successfully engage SMI smokers with digital coaching that will support use of other EX services. The investigators will develop automated and integrated procedures for identifying hospitalized SMI smokers and registering them with EX. The investigators will then examine the feasibility and acceptability of the adapted intervention to engage and retain 60 smokers with SMI after hospital discharge.