Mentally ill can smoke indoors, but not visitors

Mental health patients will be able to smoke in designated indoor smoking areas under the new smokefree laws, but visiting friends or family will not.

Mental health units, resthomes, residential care facilities and hospitals are exempt from the legislation that will see internal smoko rooms in workplaces disappear.

A Ministry of Health spokesman said the reasoning behind the exemptions was that places like mental health units and rest homes were a person's place of residence.

"We can't tell people what to do in their own home," he said.

But staff and visitors would not be able to use the internal rooms, which must be separately ventilated.

Hospitals, which were working towards being completely smokefree, were allowed to provide internal smoko rooms but most chose not to, he said.

Mental Health Commission adviser Sonja Goldsack said a mental health patient's medication could be affected by nicotine use.

"If someone comes into a unit and you start working on smoking cessation or reduction you mess around with their symptoms, so obviously it's not a good time to do it," she said.

"They are already vulnerable and distressed because they are acutely unwell. To take away what to a lot of people is a coping strategy is slightly inhumane."