She did not have "schizophrenia" in the first place. The the DSM criteria may have overlapped, but bonafide schizophrenia comes with gray matter changes seen over fMRI.
The biggest clue is that she was never responsive to antipsychotics.
What we think of as schizophrenia today is almost certainly multiple underlying disorders.
Historically autism was lumped under schizophrenia and before that they were both lumped under dementia. Symptomatically similar with insufficient diagnostic precision or theory to differentiate.
Many things cause psychosis. Drugs are a good example. When first discovered LSD was often characterized as causing temporary chemically-induced schizophrenia. A useful metaphor but not accurate.
These clearly state in the abstract that there is gray matter loss in differing stages of schizophrenia, however it is unclear if it is as a result of common medications or the disease itself. It doesn't indicate that you can scan a person without any other knowledge and diagnose them with the disease. Gray matter loss can happen for other reasons as well.
i wonder if that has anything to do with putting someone with paranoid delusions into a loud machine that you explicitly state is going to scan their brain? maybe that's why there's no good imaging studies prior to drug intervention?
further i am having a hard time coming up with medical conditions that have a single test pass/fail like this.
Maybe, but I don't think most psychiatric patients are in a constant psychotic state that they would take such a strong stand on this. Maybe a few Ken Kesey characters depicted in a cartoonish manner.
But as the article mentions it's not a single pass/fail test they seek but any biological marker at all.
The biggest clue is that she was never responsive to antipsychotics.