> A dear friend of mine quit smoking, cold-turkey, and she went completely berserk for 3 months, with dangerous mood swings and outbursts of violence. She had previously suffered a mild depression, which now emerged as some kind of dark nightmare of rage and guilt and hatred and also self-hatred.

> This is what struck me: of all the SSRIs she'd had ever tried, none had ever worked as well as tobacco. Tobacco moderated her depression and mood swings more effectively than any modern drug that her doctors had prescribed for her.

I'm not sure there is justification for the conclusion that the previous depression, and relatively severe symptoms on smoking cessation that, from your description, seem to be of a type that is known to be associated with nicotine withdrawal (though atypically severe) are indications that smoking was "treating" an underlying depression that morphed into something else when tobacco use stopped, rather than that the person involved had a past occurrence of depression and later had relatively severe nicotine withdrawal when they stopped smoking tobacco.