Smoking and men with severe mental illness

11/11/19 . News

The Forum is working with the Mental Health Consortium to investigate how to best help people with severe mental illness to stop smoking.

We're looking for your help with two surveys:

Commissioners

If you're involved in in commissioning tobacco addiction treatment and/or smoking cessation schemes; work with adults who have severe mental illness to help them to improve their health and wellbeing; or work in the NHS, Local Authorities and VCSE organisations who are responsible for developing/delivering smoking cessation, then we want to hear from you:

Complete Commissioners' Survey Here.

Men with SMI

If you're a man with severe mental illness who smokes or used to smoke, we also want to hear from you:

Complete Men With SMI Survey Here.

The Men’s Health Forum need your support

It’s tough for men to ask for help but if you don’t ask when you need it, things generally only get worse. So we’re asking.

In the UK, one man in five dies before the age of 65. If we had health policies and services that better reflected the needs of the whole population, it might not be like that. But it is. Policies and services and indeed men have been like this for a long time and they don’t change overnight just because we want them to.

It’s true that the UK’s men don’t have it bad compared to some other groups. We’re not asking you to ‘feel sorry’ for men or put them first. We’re talking here about something more complicated, something that falls outside the traditional charity fund-raising model of ‘doing something for those less fortunate than ourselves’. That model raises money but it seldom changes much. We’re talking about changing the way we look at the world. There is nothing inevitable about premature male death. Services accessible to all, a population better informed. These would benefit everyone - rich and poor, young and old, male and female - and that’s what we’re campaigning for.

We’re not asking you to look at images of pity, we’re just asking you to look around at the society you live in, at the men you know and at the families with sons, fathers and grandads missing.

Here’s our fund-raising page - please chip in if you can.

Registered with the Fundraising Regulator