Violent death and mental disorders in the Lundby Study. Accidents and suicides in a total population during a 25-year period.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the association between mental disorders and death from suicide and accident. The violent death group was drawn from a prospective psychiatric cohort study of 3,563 persons followed during 25 years (the Lundby Study). The deceased persons in the cohort had all been examined by psychiatrists on one or two occasions during their lives. Among men with a background of mental disorders, the age-standardized suicide rate was found to be about 4 times higher and the age-standardized accident rate about 2 1/2 times higher than that of the standard male population. When the immediate circumstances around the unnatural deaths were studied, mental as well as somatic disorders were found to have been present at the time of death in a high proportion of the cases. Neoplasms were found in 3 of the 28 suicide persons.