[heavyset_go]

Unfortunately, this is just statistics. There are cases that lie outside of that age range. I know of two cases, personally.

Things like stress, drugs, childbirth, significant life changes, etc can trigger psychosis and latent schizophrenia at any age, it's just statistically more likely to happen during adolescence and the period right after.

Another way to look at this is that adolescence is when someone experiences new stresses, significant life changes, drug experimentation, etc, which can be triggers for schizophrenia especially during age-correlated prodromal phases.

[suzzer99]

Yeah, in this case it seems to be menopause + losing her job and having all the free time and nothing to focus on plus who knows what other stressors. I think something bad happened with her Phish friends.

The really tough part for me is she was out of work, so I paid her to be a beta reader for my book. She's a brilliant person and very detail-oriented. She went way over and beyond what I asked for. She spent months and took three passes on the book making different kinds of notes. Then her problems seemed to come on right at the end of that. I worry that all the increased mental activity, and then suddenly not having anything to focus on again, might have been the trigger.

[mfro]

Sounds like it was bound to happen. If she hadn’t hyper focused on your book, she’d likely have found something else.

[heavyset_go]

I can identify with the guilt. In my case with my friend, their behavior lead to me distancing myself from them, not knowing what was going on, and I was his main source of socializing. Same thing happened with several of his other friends. The isolation definitely was something that amplified the progression of his illness to detachment with reality. Didn't help that the people he sought friendship from in lieu of us were scammers who fed into his delusions to take what little he had even when he became homeless.

If I could go back in time, I would do things differently, but at the same time I can't blame myself for not understanding what was happening and doing what was, at the time, the healthiest thing for myself.

Sorry to hear about your friend.

[lucidrains]

indeed, it just becomes less likely