Soc Psychiat Epidemiol (2011) 46:29–34 Controls The controls were selected from the annual surveys of living conditions (ULF), conducted by Statistics Sweden [21], which interviews, in person, a representative sample of 6,000 people from the general population. The attrition rate between 2003 and 2006 was 24%. The inclusion cri- teria of the subjects of the survey are the same as those of the cases except that the survey includes people without a Swedish social security number. The survey covers many aspects of the participants’ living conditions, including two speciﬁc questions pertaining to experiences of having been victimised. The controls were selected in a two-step procedure. First, all residents of Stockholm County, interviewed by the ULF survey in the period 2003 through 2006, were identiﬁed. Secondly, three controls per case, matched in terms of gender and age, were randomly drawn from this group, resulting in 1,170 controls. Procedure Patients were interviewed from 10 January to 12 December 2007 by two external and independent research assistants. When staff announced that a patient was returning home, he/she was asked to participate (after controlling eligibil- ity). No compensation was offered. A structured 10– 15 min interview was conducted after discharge by the responsible clinician but before the patient left the hospital building. The participants were assured that the informa- tion from the research interview would not be reported to the responsible clinician unless it concerned a threat towards a named person or a case of child mistreatment. The study was approved by Stockholm Regional Ethical Committee (Dnr 2006/1231-31). Variables Data on gender, age, voluntary/involuntary care, admis- sion/not admission and duration of admission of the cases were collected from medical case records. The interview provided further information on socio-economic status, level of education and country of birth using questions from the ULF survey. Diagnosis according to ICD [26] was obtained from the medical case records or via verbal communication with the responsible clinician. The outcome variable, victimisation, was measured by asking the patients the same two questions as posed to the controls in the ULF survey: ‘‘have you been subjected to violence resulting in visible injuries during the last twelve months?’’ and ‘‘have you been subjected to violence that required medical attention during the last twelve months?’’ The latter type of victimisation is considered more severe 31 than the former. Sexual violence is included, provided it left visible physical marks and/or required medical attention. Data analysis All data are presented in terms of descriptive statistics, i.e. mean and standard deviation for continuous data, and fre- quency and relative frequency for categorical data together with the exact (binominal distribution) 95% conﬁdence intervals (CI). Participants and refusals were compared using t test for continuous data and Chi-square for cate- gorical data. Data were checked for skewness. All tests were two-tailed and P \ 0.05 was regarded as statistically signiﬁcant. The crude odds ratios (OR) and the corre- sponding 95% CI of being violently victimised among the cases versus controls were computed using Stata version 10.1. Results General characteristics The 390 patients comprised 203 (52%) females and 187 (48%) males, with a mean age of 36 and 38 years, respectively (Table 1). About half of the patients were diagnosed as having a major mental disorder (schizophre- nia, delusional disorder, mood disorder with psychotic symptoms, and unspeciﬁed psychosis). Sixty-ﬁve percent (n = 252) had been admitted; mean duration 17 days. Most cases (73%) were in voluntary treatment. Twenty- seven percent were not born in Sweden, compared to 20% of the controls. Forty percent of the patients lacked a ‘cash safety margin’ of 1,500€, i.e. the amount of money that could be raised in an acute situation. The cases had a lower mean economic income than the controls (Table 1). Twenty percent of the cases had not ﬁnished 9 years of school, which is the compulsory length of education in Sweden. Victimisation Twenty percent of the patients reported that they had been victimised in the year preceding the interview and half of them, 10.2% of the whole sample, to the degree that medical attention was needed (Table 2). The corresponding ﬁgures for the controls were 3.8 and 1.3%. Victimisation was slightly more prevalent, but not statistically signiﬁcant, among female rather than male patients, while the reverse was true among the controls (Table 2). The odds of being victimised was 4.7 (CI 2.6–8.3) for male patients and 10.5 (CI 5.7–19.9) for female patients 123