Thirty-seven inpatients from an Ontario Provincial Psychiatric Hospital, who completed suicide, and 37 matched in-patient controls were studied. Twenty-eight of the suicide victims had schizophrenia, 21 were single, 5 married, and 11 divorced, separated or widowed. Their mean age at suicide was 38.9+/- 14.6 years. Twelve of the suicide victims completed suicide after having been in hospital over 1 year. Three of the suicide victims were epileptics, all three had temporal lobe epilepsy.