But from what I heard, I can say that people suffering from this disease are not frequently violent towards others.
Yes, most are not violent with others, but some can be.
They might be afraid of people who wear blue jeans or think that wearing a certain hat will keep them save from rays from outer space. Something like that.
Continuing what I said above... What you said above is exactly right, but if they are extremely paranoid or delusional, they can become violent. For instance, I have somewhat long hair. At one point, it was about 1/2 way down my back and I came to work with it hanging down. I later got hot and put it up with a hairclip. Well, one patient who was paranoid decided that the 'government' had done this to my hair and that I now had radio beams or some such coming out of my head which were monitoring his and every other patients every move. He got quite worked up about the whole situation and could well have become violent. Some people probably would have called him violent because he yelled and screamed a lot and threatened to do more. Even letting my hair back down did not help the situation. So this is just one situation where someone suffering from paranoia could have been dangerous to others. If this had happened on the street rather than in the hospital, I could very much have seen this man attacking me.
I don't know about the rate or risk of suicides in schizophrenics. I did see a recent article that said that the risk might be less than previously thought.
As long as we are talking about psychiatric issues (sorry for hijacking your FDK thread, Mary), let me take this opportunity to explain that schizophrenia is not the same as multiple personality disorder. (It's also not the same as bipolar disorder or manic-depression.) Many people think that shizophrenia means multiple personalities. It doesn't. I think that may happen because of the paranoia and delusions that a schizophrenic can suffer and they sometimes seem to be 'another person' or have another personality, but that's just their delusional / paranoid thoughts coming out. (Of course, there are instances where both multiple personality disorder and schizophrenia can occur simultaneously, but that's a whole other conversation because some psychiatric folks don't believe that multiple personality disorder truly exists.)
