Tobacco firms warned that quitting smoking could harm smokers’ mental health
Evidence
The tobacco industry not only stressed the benefits of smoking but also warned of the dangers to mental health of quitting smoking: It is a reasonable inference that the mental health of the smokers would be even worse if they were deprived of smoking. Professor I. Mills (University of Cambridge) has pointed out that underlying depression can be masked by the increasing level of arousal and many subjects resort to this mechanism to cope with depression. Smoking would appear to be one method of sustaining high levels of arousal. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1642
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- CANDY: A striking, immediately shareable example of tobacco marketing audacity — warning that quitting is bad for your mental health.
Related
- Industries justify harmful products by magnifying their psychological benefits (similarity 0.87)
- Tobacco companies advertised smoking as having genuine health and performance benefits (similarity 0.84)
- Tobacco firms rebutted passive-smoking claims by attacking the science (similarity 0.82)
- Cigarette smoking kills nearly half a million Americans each year (similarity 0.80)
- Tobacco firms ridiculed science showing tobacco harms to discredit it (similarity 0.79)
- Reframing health harms as social discomfort is a linguistic strategy of moral disengagement. (similarity 0.78)
- Quitting smoking produces a measurable, dose-dependent reduction in death rate (similarity 0.78)