How old was everyone when you started having symptoms? I had an imaginary friend when I was 6 that I still see to this day. My symptoms came in stages. I was around 8 when I started hearing voices sometimes and I was 12 when I started having delusions. My first psychotic episode was when I was 15. I’m now 18 and hearing and seeing things is part of my everyday life. Delusions come and go I never know when I’m delusional until it’s over. I also smell things and feel things but they are harder to tell if it’s reality or not.
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I was about 15 16 years old.
Growing up I was autistic but they only told me that when I was 32
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I’m autistic too I got diagnosed when I was 17.
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Nope. Normal childhood here. A bit introverted and absent-minded but socially able and good grades in school. No imaginary friends. Onset at 30 yo.
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16, in the process of getting diagnosed
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I became psychotic around 36, and developed sz at 47. I guess I’m a late bloomer 
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It’s a long process especially when you are young. I never believed I was unwell until I joined this forum.
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Everyone is different I guess there really isn’t a set age it happens. I think the trauma I experienced in childhood is why it developed for me a lot quicker.
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It’s hard to tell when I first became psychotic as opposed to being ‘markedly different’. From an early age I was a loner and very introverted. Very withdrawn. There were no friends to lose, which is the opposite experience of many here. There was an experience around the age of 9 when a Chinese man came out of the clothes cupboard and said I’d have a long life.However there was no repeat of anything like that. Pre hospitalisation there was increasing depression and anxiety, with a marked drop in my schoolwork. Saying how much of that was autism related as opposed to ‘psychosis spectrum’ related is hard.
I can have periods of being quite dismissive of having a ‘severe mental illness’. That can affect the process of looking back to see those 1st signs of psychosis. The counter argument to that dismissiveness is ‘Well you’ve been a service user for over 4 decades, so something must be going on’.
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First hallucinations were at age 14. At age 11 I genuinely believed God was giving me a terrible life because he wanted me to kill myself, but it’s hard to tell whether that counts as a delusion or just a depressed religious kid thought.
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My first memory as a child was looking out side the classroom and speaking to the Tree Branch, later I was religious and got me till Bachelors in computer science, after I drop religious thoughts I got diagnosed in my masters as schizophrenia and dropped studies. Worked multiple places but I always came back to my studies I dropped out off.
Is studing something a symptoms of schizophrenia, where I live people say he got ill studying too much 
I don’t believe it though.
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I also asked my pdoc in fact he said its not related, I can study…
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