'Doing Things Little by Little': Smoking and Vaping While Being Pharmaceutically Treated for Schizophrenia

Abstract

This paper explores the experiences of smoking and ‘vaping’ while being pharmaceutically treated for schizophrenia, as well as what the experiences of breathing smoke and vapour in and out can reveal about health ‘care’, toward the self and others. Drawing on ethnographic data collected over 2015–2016 in Australia and the UK, and particularly on patient experiences in the UK where electronic cigarettes had become an endorsed Nicotine Replacement Therapy, I argue that inhaling nicotine via e-cigarettes can, like tobacco cigarettes, be experienced in terms of temporal opportunities for self-reclamation and experiences of health. When patients opted to vape instead of smoke, their sense of self-reclamation allowed for shifted attention toward the movement and materiality of exhalations, and toward how second-hand vapour (compared to smoke) is socially received. Experiences of vaping were, however, contingent on the clinical endorsement of e-cigarettes and were inconsistent inside and outside of clinical spaces. Further consideration should be given to vaping as a harm minimisation tool in Western societies dealing with widening disparities in health. Ultimately, clozapine-treated schizophrenia patients continue to smoke or vape for reasons that speak to the desire to make ‘time’; to find connections to life rather than focusing on death.