I believe schizophrenia in men is most likely to emerge between the late teens and mid 20s, but does anyone know what is the youngest age it emerges by?
yes, this is so. I knew two people with schizophrenia pretty well when they were high school age before they developed signs. One was a close friend of mine who was a talented artist, one of the most politically and emotionally "smart" and insightful people I knew. He was also a very empathetic person who helped rescue his best friend from homelessness and convince him to get his diploma and turn his life around (which he has- he's a successful documentary filmmaker now). The change was sudden and happened while I was at college. One day the friend who developed the illness called me and I couldn't understand half of where he was going during our conversation. I thought he was screwing with me and kidding around. But a week later he called again and it was just as bad. A couple of months later he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He didn't want to take his meds because he was sure someone was trying to poison him, but he trusted his formerly homeless friend enough that he was able to be convinced by him to try the regimen. He knew he wasn't well, but he hated what the drugs did to him. He was a shell of his former self. He got heavy and sluggish and his reflexes seemed like he was moving underwater. This was in the mid 80s, so meds have gotten better since then. He ended up killing himself in despair, but he was never violent and didn't lose his love for people he trusted.
The second person was someone my better half met and mentored through a sport from the time he was in middle school. This boy was bright, and excited about the future, and creative, and a hard worker. Under my better half's guidance he ended up going to school for a creative degree in the sane field as his mentor. He was so focussed on his craft that his mentor hired him to work for his team at a large international paper. He was a great employee, if a little too intense about everything, and all was normal until one day when he started to tell his boss he didn't feel comfortable around a fellow employee. He ended up going to hr because he was convinced this other employee hated him and was dangerous and could potentially "go postal" for lack of a better phrase. It was a huge mess. In the end the employee who'd been reported was either let go or resigned (I can't remember which). Anyway…some months go by and more layoffs happen, and then my sig other's hire was let go as well. And then a year goes by and we see him at an event and it gets weird. But we chalk it up to hard feelings about the layoffs. And then another year goes by and we find out from his brother that he's been diagnosed with schizophrenia recently, and all of the pieces start to fall into place. Last we heard he was doing very well on the medication he was on and had stabilized, but the whole thing is heartbreaking. He went from having a coveted creative position doing something he loved at age 21 to being heavily medicated and unable to fully participate in society only a few years later.
Oh, one final story, and this is about frontal lobe damage: I know a couple who've been long-term friends of my mother. Over the years they'd done weekly favors for each other, vacationed together, etc. One day about 6 years ago the wife of the couple came home to find that her husband had *pretty much disemboweled himself* in their bed. He lived, btw. He'd had a psychotic break pretty much out of nowhere. The doctors suspected it could have been linked to a head injury he'd sustained a year or two before, because he was in his 40s and that's very late for someone to develop schizophrenia, but they are still unclear on what happened. At this point they are now treating it as schizophrenia brought on by frontal lobe damage, and he's on medication that's slowly but surely allowed him to return to caring for himself but also caring for others (like picking my mom up in a car from the mechanic, helping her with some moving chores etc.)
This is all probably far off-topic, but I just wanted to relay these stories of examples of seen of young people suddenly developing schizophrenia at about the same age as CD as well as the completely irrational and violent behavior that can sometimes happen with a psychotic break. Also, developing schizophrenia or having a psychotic break doesn't mean that someone can't have had criminal or violent tendencies and/or co-morbid issues before that particular illness manifests itself.