NAMI Ask the Expert: Good News for People With Mental Illness As the Great American Smokeout Nears

As we prepare for the 2020 Great American Smokeout, there is excellent news for people who smoke or whose loved ones smoke. During this webinar, Dr. A. Eden Evins will discuss treatments that are available now that are well tolerated, and work to help people with mental illness quit smoking for good. Behavioral health clinicians have new guidance to be able to treat all smokers.

After the presentation, NAMI’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Ken Duckworth, will moderate a Q&A session. This session will be recorded and posted to our website within 1-2 days of the webinar ending. A typed transcription of the audio will also be provided within 1 week of the webinar ending.

Our Expert

Dr. A. Eden Evins is founder and director of the Center for Addiction Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, and The Cox Family Professor of Psychiatry in the Field of Addiction Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She has served as faculty of the MGH Schizophrenia Program since 1995.

Dr. Evins earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia and her medical degree at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. She completed an internship in Pediatric Medicine at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington DC and her residency in psychiatry at Massachusetts Mental Health Center and Harvard-Longwood Psychiatry Residency Training Program in Boston, where she was also chief resident. She conducted a fellowship in molecular biology at the Mailman Research Center of McLean Hospital and a second fellowship in clinical and translational research at MGH with Dr. Don Goff. She received a Master’s in Public Health in Clinical Effectiveness from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Dr. Evins studies efficacy of pharmacotherapeutic tobacco smoking cessation aids, the effect of nicotine on cognitive performance, behavioral, physiologic and fMRI ascertained assessments of impulsivity, risk taking, reactivity to drug-related cues and the relationship between cue reactivity and relapse to drug use, and effect of cannabis on psychiatric symptoms, cognitive function, addictive behaviors, and brain function. She has conducted a series of studies that have changed clinical practice guidelines for tobacco smoking cessation for those with and without serious mental illness. She has shown that smoking cessation treatments are safe and effective in people with psychiatric illness, that maintenance treatment normalizes the rate of relapse for people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. This work has underpinned the removal of the boxed warnings for neuropsychiatric adverse events for varenicline and bupropion. Her work has been featured in media outlets throughout the world including ABC World News, Reuters Health, The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times, Scientific American Mind, Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, and The National Alliance on Mental Illness Advocate Magazine.

Dr. Evins has received three career awards from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and has brought in over $35 million in grant funding to Mass General for the study of addictive disorders and their treatment, over 22 years of continuous NIH funding. She has mentored over 35 junior investigators, many with mentored career awards from the NIH, leads a NIH-funded training program at Mass General, and has authored well over 150 publications, including over 50 publications with a mentee as first author and has one patent that is pending.

Read the Transcript

NAMI Ask the Expert is an informational webinar series and is not intended to provide medical advice on any specific topic or for any specific individual. The series is made possible through the generous support of people like you. If you’re enjoying this free program, please consider donating at NAMI.org/donate.

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