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I'm Simon Chapman, I'm Professor public health in the School of Public Health
most people who quit smoking, um, quit smoking
on their own. They don't use pharmaceuticals,
they don't go along to professional help, they don't attend a group or
counseling. Um. They just decide that
this is something that they don't want to do any longer and they usually have
a few attempts, sometimes quite a few attempts, and eventually they succeed.
But the real paradox is that
while about two-thirds to three-quarters of ex-smokers have quit like that,
we don't know very much about that process.
We've studied the tail rather than the dog.
And so we've got an NHMRC project looking at
the natural history of unassisted smoking cessation.
Instead of constantly feeding the community a diet of
"oh, to quit smoking, it's terribly hard",
"don't try and do it on your own whatever you do",
you know, "use assistance", we may be able to find some
very important, very positive messages for smokers
to say; "we'll, look, most people who have quit smoking
have done it on there own, and here's
how they went about it", here some other tricks if you like,
here are some of the internal mental narratives that people
use to say to themselves "look I'm not going to smoke any longer".
Um. It's amazing that this is an area
which has not been researched before.