Daniel Weinberger, in his classic paper on brain development and schizophrenia (10), entertained the “unlikely” possibility that schizophrenia is “not the result of a discrete event or illness process at all, but rather one end of the developmental spectrum that for genetic and/or other reasons 0.5% of the population will fall into.”
Schizophrenia is increasingly considered a subtle neurodevelopmental disorder of brain connectivity, of how the functional circuits in our brains are wired
Schizophrenia may be the uniquely human price we pay as a species for the complexity of our brain; in the end, more or less by genetic and environmental chance, some of us get wired for psychosis.
Schizophrenia is likely the result of an abnormal developmental trajectory of synapse and circuit formation that ultimately leads to a miswired brain and clinical symptoms.