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I believe that usually the symptoms emerge in the late teens/early 20s, although they can show up at any time. Most of the time there's a family history of it, so that can indicate whether or not you should be watching out for it.
I believe that if you take medication regularly, you can live a pretty normal life -- however, a number of schizophrenics either don't want to acknowledge how the disease can screw up their lives or, because of symtoms of the disease, decide that they don't want to (i.e., paranoid schizophrenics might decide the medication is actually poison). One of my friends is schizophrenic and stopped taking his medication about six months after he was diagnosed. He's had a few setbacks but those tapered off. His behavior is never violent, merely irrational. I'm pretty sure he could be one of those 99 percent functional types if he was on his meds, but short of an intervention there is little we can do to get him to take them, and with no obvious manifestations of the disease in the past year, I doubt he'd take an intervention seriously.
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