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I saw my psychiatrist’s initial “request for treatment” form filled out for the insurance company when I asked to see the start of my file ten years into therapy. The diagnosis read “Schizoaffective bi-polar type.” This was THREE YEARS before my psychotic break. He completed a four-year fellowship at Austin Riggs, a private hospital where rich kids with schizophrenia go for two or three years for hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to get back on their feet after being diagnosed. So . . . he sort of specializes in schizophrenia. Walking into his office instead of another changed my life. Forgetting learning to cope better with the illness, it sculpted me in ways for the better. I’m a different person than I would have been and I see his teachings guide my behavior as much as my parents’.
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I don’t know. They did it behind my back. I remember I was 16 when I asked a friend - 15 - if we were maybe schizophrenic. It seeped in slowly after that. Never was told, and I liked it that way. It was my own discovery in my own time.
I was first diagnosed with schizophrenia at 23 but schizoaffective disorder at 24 but they keep flipping back and forth on the subtype.
i was 18 when I was first diagnosed with sz. I’m now 32.
I should have been diagnosed at about 14 when I desperately sought help from my mom, telling her about hearing voices and how scared I was, but she didn’t know what to do. At 19, I was diagnosed with depression, 21, Bulimia…27, anxiety…45, Social Anxiety Disorder, and 48, Schizophrenia.
20 so i can fit two categories on the poll
I was dxed with sz at 18,sz/a around the age of 26 but then switched to personality disorder at 48.
Personally I think diagnosis is a crap shoot, and heavily dependant on the differing emphasis put on symptoms by various pdocs. Also whether you are seen as an awkward patient/pdoc has a personal dislike for you(shoe in for a personality disorder).
It was like a cold hard slap in the face the way my Pdoc flicked that Sz label off her tongue at me.
I can still hear those words, and my horrified reply, “But I don’t wanna be Sz.”
I was feelin’ 22 
I started being prodromal around 31, and became full blown psychotic at 35. I spent seven months out of my mind and it was a horrific trip.
I was hospitalized for 6 months when I was 15 before officially being diagnosed…or at least before they found medications that worked for me at the time. However I had symptoms much earlier than that…I used to think my pictures would speak to me, entire conversations with celebrities on my wall…this was before harry potter and their “talking” photos. I also thought I could communicate with people via free-hand writing. Not just dead (as I’ve read in research), but living as well. I eventually got rid of my large celebrity photo collection because I thought it would stop the noise.
I was put on my first anti-psychotic when I was 28. It was a drug called Moban. I hated it. I lost a lot of physical strength when they put me on this drug.
First floridly psychotic episode at age 18-19, but I mellowed out on my own somehow (magically). Later, at age 19, I mentioned some of my insomnia to my pdoc and he labeled me as bipolar. Then, in my early 20’s, I got labeled pure schizophrenic, paranoid type, after I wound up in the hospital rambling about gov conspiracies, assassins, and electromagnetic frequencies…
In my mid-20’s, a new pdoc decided to add the “affective” part to my diagnosis. I agree with this diagnosis, as it encompasses my insomnia/ability to start a million projects but never finish one/megalomania, and all those bipolar symptoms, and also my schizophrenic symptoms.
I was acutely psychotic at 23 and got diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic at 24!
officially sza as a teen then paranoid sz. Personally I think diagnoses are bs and luck of the draw on the pdoc. I wanted diagnosis of DID but when I explained the people I talk to and see are just in limbo and I am their guardian until they cross over, yeah well that didn’t go so well with pdoc.
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My therapist told me that i had schizophrenia at 22 years old in 2015. I was officially diagnosed with it at 23 back in january. Turning 24 on wednesday. My psychotic symptoms are mostly gone but now i have intrusive thoughts and that makes it hard to be around my family.
I was either 20 or 21 years old
I am on the older side of the spectrum, as I was 32. I recently found out from my grandmother that that is the same age that my uncle, who was also sz, got sick.