Mental health patients smoke more than three times as much as the general population, a Public Health England and NHS survey of 105 care units suggests.
Smoking can increase depression and anxiety and reduce the effectiveness of medication by up to 50%, experts warn.
PHE wants all mental-health hospitals to be smoke-free zones.
But smokers' rights group Forest says patients in mental health units should have the same freedom to smoke as the general public.
The PHE survey suggests 64% of mental-health patients are addicted to tobacco - compared with 18% of the general population, although 9% of the units are already completely smoke-free.
It is publishing new guidance to help medium- and low-security mental-health units implement National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) recommendations that all NHS-funded hospitals should provide stop-smoking services.
Experts say smoking is the main reason mental-health patients have a life expectancy that is 10 to 20 years lower,
Kevin Fenton, PHE national director of health and wellbeing said the organisation wanted to "reduce the unacceptable inequalities in health experienced by people living with mental-health problems".
[For more of this story, written by Sima Kotecha, go to http://www.bbc.com/news/health-32982669]
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