I actually want to point out that my trajectory may have actually been more severe than a lot of people who actually have a sz diagnosis because my hallucinations did not stop at all ever without meds. I mean a lot of people just have intermittent hallucinations they can deal with for 6 months or longer before they even meet a pdoc and no one even notices they are sick. That's why they get a sz diagnosis because they met it before treatment even began. In my case its more like the freaking flood waters broke and I was completely sick overnight so what I'm wondering is if what you are detecting here is actually the difference between acute and insidious onset. People who have a sz diagnosis may just be more likely to have an insidious rather than an acute onset and acute onset is a known good prognostic indicator. In fact there is another category in the ICD-10 called acute and transient psychotic disorders that more or less is defined by acute onset and rapid recovery----this doesn't really exist in the DSM except for brief psychotic disorder but that is less than 1 month psychosis. ATPD lets you have 3 months to recover and it's defined by a less than 48 hour onset so its what I tend to associate with most but I only found out about it recently since its not in the DSM and the individual names of the diseases in it are completely variable around the world. So that is partially why I had you define sz for me I wanted to make sure we were on the same page. Personally I think the dxes are just trends anyway---current (new)pdoc was talking about brief psychotic disorder even though I don't meet the criteria for that because I was psychotic too long because she considers the DSM a rough guide and now that she can see that I got better and am off meds she's leaning toward that because it makes more sense now considering my outcome but she never saw me when I was sick. To me the whole point of having a dx is to determine outcome but you know whatever as long as I stay well.