Cigarettes could get you down.

: Lighting up a fag could, quite literally, drive you to despair. Smoking could be a cause of depression, anxiety, panic attacks and perhaps even schizophrenia, reveals recent research.

Indentifying tobacco as a potential cause of depression goes against conventional wisdom. "I actually feel that lighting up relieves my blues,'' said Deepak Sood, a college student who smokes a pack a day.

Cashing in on this popular perception, the tobacco industry routinely markets its products as something that will lift your spirits and soothe frazzled nerves.

However, experts now are increasingly saying that the short-term feel-good state is misleading since nicotine could well be insidiously damaging the central nervous system, increasing the risk of mental illness.

The new findings are somewhat heretical because they go against not only popular perceptions but also against common medical beliefs.

In the past, whenever a strong correlation between tobacco and depression was observed, it was concluded that the illness preceded the addiction. So the typical explanation for why a large number of depressed people smoked was that the depression came first, and it drove people to light up so that they could alleviate and self-medicate their symptoms.

But the new studies, which are large and very well done by most experts' accounts, indicate that smoking ...