(CNN) -- The intrusive voices popped into William "Bill" Garrett's head. "They're coming for you," the voices told the 18-year-old. "Find somewhere to hide; they're going to get you."



In the left shows William "Bill" Garrett in high school, and the right is a 2007 photo of the Maryland teenager.



They told the Johns Hopkins University freshman that his father had poisoned the family dog, his sister had injected crystal methamphetamine into his pet lizard and his grandmother had put human body parts into his food.



As schizophrenia took hold, the Maryland teenager became lost within his own mind and had to leave college after winning a full, four-year scholarship.



Garrett's experience echoes the teenage years of Nathaniel Ayers, a promising string bass player whose musical training at the Juilliard School was cut short by schizophrenia, a brain disorder that blurs a person's ability to distinguish between reality and delusions.



Ayers became homeless and played Beethoven pieces on a broken violin in the streets of Los Angeles, California. His struggles with schizophrenia and his friendship with a Los Angeles Times columnist inspired the movie "The Soloist," which releases Friday.



His sister, Jennifer Ayers-Moore, hopes the movie will raise awareness about schizophrenia and has established the Nathaniel Anthony Ayers Foundation for the artistically gifted mentally ill.



"I know there are thousands of Nathaniels, and they deserve a chance, too," said Ayers-Moore, an Atlanta-based social worker.



Teen interrupted



Schizophrenia is the result of disrupted brain development. Males typically get symptoms during their teens or early 20s, as Ayers and Garrett did.



"It's a critical time for the brain," said Dr. Jon McClellan, the medical director of the Child Study and Treatment Center at Seattle Children's Hospital. "It's the CEO part of the brain that pays attention, makes decisions and filters. The prefrontal cortex, that's the last area of the brain to develop.  As that area comes online, that's when the illness presents."



In high school, Garrett won elected offices in student government and headed the lacrosse and cross country teams. A gifted student, he wanted to study political science and biology at Hopkins.



At home, he cooked family dinners, helped his little sister with homework, and surprised his mother with pancakes on her birthday.



"People likened him to the perfect child before he got sick," said his mother, Kristan Kanyuch.



In 2007, the unusual behaviors started. He slept a lot. He emptied an entire can of bug spray in his bedroom. When he came home for a weekend from college, he pointed to a blister on his hand that had formed from playing lacrosse.



"Look, I have gangrene," he said.  "My hand is going to rot." Then he tried to cut off his hand with a paring knife.



His family stopped him and took him to an emergency room for a psych evaluation, but Garrett refused to wait and left.



A week later, Kanyuch got a call from the university. Her son was failing every class. When confronted, Garrett looked at the F's and calmly replied, "I'm not failing anything."



In the 1970s, Ayers-Moore saw the symptoms when her family picked her brother up from Juilliard to head home to Cleveland, Ohio, for summer.



"The look in his eye was so different," she said. "It was like you could see into his soul, he could look into yours. It sort of startled me a little bit. I didn't know what to say to him. On the way from New York, I pretended I was asleep. I didn't know what to say."



Paranoid schizophrenia



About three decades later, Nickole Kanyuch, 15, watched a similar scenario unfold as her brother, Garrett, struggled with paranoid schizophrenia and obsessive compulsive disorder.



"I watched the big brother who I had looked up to all my life fall apart
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