It has been known for decades that smokers have a "smoker personality" which differs from non-smokers. In recent years some evidence emerged that smoking is the cause of this rather than vice versa.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140715141355.h...
There are some good points regarding policy, like if there are anti smoking policies then suicide risk is lower.
I think there are two kinds: chill balanced smokers and smokers who think it is bad for them and use it to show slow suicide. So I am not surprised smoker suicide rates are higher. Anti smoking policies reducing suicide is interesting. could be preventing a mild suicide from starting helps it not graduate to more serious. Mental health decline after starting smoking != mental health decline from nicotine, I bet it is real and big part of it is nicotine but doing daily and visibly something much of society frowns upon probably "helps". And also just knowing that you are killing yourself, if you are that kind of smoker
Them saying that drugs can cause depression is basically saying nothing (basically same as "not using drugs can cause depression").
It's confusing that Serbia beats almost everyone by amount of smokers, it is the most smoke filled place I visited but it is not even in the top in https://www.wcrf.org/preventing-cancer/cancer-statistics/lun......
A similar thing to what you said about smoking in Serbia is observed with alcohol: Within a society, the earlier someone gets into contact with alcohol, the poorer the outcomes.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2741422/
However there are societies where even children are given alcohol (like Italy) and where alcohol related disorders are much less frequent than in societies which strictly limit alcohol to adults.
In that case, probably social norms which help prevent such disorders have a larger effect than the drinking age. However such would be difficult to imagine for smoking.
True. Like in Russia normally a child drinking any alcohol is super bad and unacceptable. Many places don't sell alcohol after certain time of day. And people in russia drink less in total than in many european countries. But they do "risky drinking pattern".
I knew a British guy who can start before noon and drink till night while maintaining sanity. he is strategic, drinks weak ass beer etc. And yes he had a "drinking problem". But a russian with the same problem would get shitfaced and completely out of control by mid afternoon... and I hope you don't meet him on the street, if he doesn't like how you walk he can murder you and not remember it in the morning. I'm not joking.
> However such would be difficult to imagine for smoking.
So I'm not totally sure it's too different. While smoking is bad I think it can be a disorder or associated with a disorder (call it "risky smoking pattern") however it can also be a mostly neutral habit. Less stress, less harm.
Also, a thing I've recently read
> People with Schizophrenia appear to have a high rate of self-medication with nicotine; the therapeutic effect likely occurs through dopamine modulation by nicotinic acetylcholine receptors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine_hypothesis_of_schizop...
If schizotypy is a spectrum and many people are somewhere on it then nicotine can make someone feel saner. (Of course smoking is probably not the best way of getting nicotine)
Yes they have to. There's no way to do it otherwise and get any meaningful data. You have to get `n` to be very large.