self-medication for the medicated

schizophrenia drugs are notorious for, among other things, blunting mental ability. via world of psychology, nicotine may counteract this effect:

nicotine patches boosted schizophrenics’ performance on tests of short-term memory and of mental processing speed abilities with which Haloperidol, the leading antipsychotic drug, interferes. Nicotine also improved participants’ attention spans as they tackled a boring computer task for 14 mind-numbing minutes