Schizophrenia is, from my experience, very much like autism. It is actually also along a spectrum; but more importantly: it's not even necessarily a bad thing.
Just like autistic people have started referring to normal people as 'neurotypical,' I'm fairly certain schizophrenics once used to be a very important part of society: the mystics.
From my personal experience schizophrenia is extreme pattern matching to the point of solipsistic union not with 'reality' but with all of your sensory inputs.
That might have to do with my personal experience, where there where not so much voices as an all encompassing ubermind which would manifest itself as a single voice which you would call 'intuition' but for me was more of deity.
One of the best sayings I've found since then is: 'The mystic swims in the same ocean the schizophrenic drowns in.'