Just to tell another possible path schizophrenia can take. When my mother went off her meds she got significantly worse very quickly and would never quite recover to where she was before hand. But even while medicated she would still get worse each year. In her teens she scored a near perfect SAT(1560) but by the time she was 23 she was no longer able to hold down a job and by her early 30s she could barely string a sentence together that made any sense.