I have schizophrenia. It's pretty mild as schizophrenia goes - I can hold down a job and don't produce word salad, but I've spent the best part of 3 years in psychiatric hospitals, have been through most of the anti-psychotic medications and have found one that mostly works at the maximum dose. Up until 2 years ago I had a psychiatric nurse that visited me every two weeks, and I had a psychiatrist that I saw every 3 - 4 months (or whenever I was ill), but all of that support is now gone.
Earlier this year I stopped taking my medication, and had a glorious month of feeling fantastic followed by a hard relapse. When I started to get ill, I went to my GP and said 'I think I'm starting to get ill'. They said they'd refer me to the local community psychiatric team, and it would take a maximum of a week.
In reality it took 6 weeks to see somebody, during which time I couldn't work, which meant giving my employer a reason for being off and essentially telling them that I have schizophrenia.
When I finally managed to see a psychiatrist from the assessment team they saw me twice until I was slightly less ill, then discharged me to the care of a psychiatric nurse who visits my GPs surgery.
What actually happened, though, was that I never got a letter from the GP surgery to see the nurse. When I spoke somebody from the surgery about it he said that the availability of the psychiatric nurse at the surgery is on a week-by-week basis, depending upon how much money there is that week. The GP that I'd been seeing hadn't referred me to the nurse, even though the psychiatrist from the assessment team had explicitly put it in his report (I don't think that my GP had even bothered to read the report).
It's now months later. I still haven't seen the nurse and I don't have a psychiatrist or anybody in charge of my care. The GPs at the surgery are variable - one of them seems to care a lot but one of them basically made a point of telling me that my medication is on a repeat prescription so there's no point coming in to see him regularly, the others seem indifferent.
Once you get used to the fact that nobody is looking out for you it's kind of liberating in a way, because nobody is trying to oversee your life, but also kind of scary too because there is no support. All you can do is work hard at being healthy with all the things that you can control (take your medication, work on diet, exercise, sleep, etc), try to save some money for the periods in which you won't be able to work and try not to worry about the rest.