Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Tobacco Cessation Among Psychiatric Partial Hospital Patients

People with serious mental illness are three times more likely to smoke cigarettes than people without mental illness. People with mental illness are less likely to be successful in quitting smoking than those without mental illness. Therefore, the healthcare community needs to find ways to get people with mental illness treatment to help them stop smoking. This study explores whether a treatment, called acceptance and commitment therapy, which is an affective therapy for serious mental illness, can help patients with serious mental illness stop smoking. In particular, the investigators test whether patients will be interested in receiving acceptance and commitment therapy for smoking cessation in a psychiatric partial hospital (also known as a day treatment program), whether they are able to complete the treatment, and whether it will help them stop smoking compared to usual care. To test these research questions, 40 patients in the Rhode Island Hospital's psychiatric partial hospital will be recruited. Half of the patients will receive acceptance and commitment therapy to help them stop smoking (2 in person sessions, 5 telephone sessions) and half will receive usual care (2 in person sessions, electronic referral to the Rhode Island tobacco quit line). All participants will be offered the nicotine patch. All participants will complete a baseline survey and a follow-up visit at the end of treatment to measure whether they stopped smoking and whether they liked the treatment. The study will also measure how many participants completed the treatment sessions. If successful, this treatment model could be a way to get more patients with mental illness into treatment.