The records of 43 deceased patients with well-classified epilepsy were analyzed, with special attention to cases of suicide. The subjects were compared with 1722 control patients who had showed definite subtypes of epilepsy. 6 patients died by suicide. There were no significant differences with regard to clinical variables except for psychotic episodes, which were more frequently encountered in subjects than in controls. Suicide was only encountered in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy & the association was statistically significant. Most suicides were found to be the result of an immediate causal relationship with ictal or interictal epileptic manifestations rather than a result of augmentation of pscyhosocial stressors generated by a long-standing handicap derived from severe illness. (22 refs.) JA