Problem/Objective: People with mental illness have a disproportionately higher prevalence of smoking than the general population and lower tobacco abstinence rates have been reported. Many mentally ill lack access to face-to-face tobacco intervention programs because of financial and transportation issues. Telephone quitlines overcome these barriers, but questions as to effectiveness in this population remains. This report describes the experience of the Mayo Clinic Tobacco Quitline in providing tobacco services to those self-reporting at least one mental illness. Counselors and professional staff providing cessation counseling will benefit from this presentation.

Methods: The Mayo Clinic Tobacco Quitline database was queried to identify unique callers who enrolled in the telephonic tobacco intervention program who self-report at least one mental illness. Analysis of quit rates, demographics, co-morbidities, tobacco use history, cessation medication use and utilization of the telephonic services was performed comparing this subset of the population to the population of callers as a whole during the same time period.

Results: Thirty-three per cent of the enrollees reported they had at least one mental illness. At seven months after the initial assessment, the self-reported seven day abstinence rates for those who reported having a mental illness was 21.2% compared to 26.9% for all callers during the same time period.

Conclusions: People with mental illness had high utilization of quitline services, but demonstrated tobacco abstinence rates less than callers without mental illness. Detailed analysis of these outcomes will be presented and implications for program management, modification of existing interventions and counselor training will be discussed.