Table 1.

Theme 4: Thematic associations between specific positive psychotic symptoms and specific life and trauma events, with quotes from the perspective of participants

Participant	Trauma and life events in the association	Positive psychotic symptoms in the association	Quotes of the thematic association
1	Sexual abuse before 16 years old by her father Physical abuse Death threat by her father Emotional abuse	Olfactory hallucinations Tactile hallucinations Persecutory delusions Ideas of life threat Esoteric delusions Grandiose ideas	‘Frankly, the smell of rape is nauseating, extremely strong, somewhere between burnt rice and rotten eggs.’ ‘When you’ve been the victim of a crime, you emit pheromones to say “I’ve been raped” for example, and it’s as if you’ve been marked by these pheromones to indicate to the rest of the species that you’ve been raped.’ ‘That’s what really triggered me to self-sequestrate and protect myself, a drop came out of the point here and it was as if it had burned me and dripped a little like a drop of sweat, and it gave off a very strong odour, which gave me hot flashes and dizziness (…) physically it was like that, it was wet, there was really something coming out of my body at that moment. as if I were liquefying or as if my body was being decomposed.’ ‘I just said to myself, I’m in danger, I’ve got to warn that I’m being attacked, I felt like it was going to paralyse me, and so, uh, I just protected myself as best I could, not knowing if I was going to survive another minute or not. (…) the intuition that someone wanted to hurt me, in fact it’s always been present in my life, given my very heavy past, it’s always been the case, it’s just that I know how to react to avoid someone hurting me, and maybe that’s why it seems a bit strange what happened, I avoided someone hurting me.’ ‘I’ve been in survival mode since I was a little girl, since I was a little baby, I was a victim of crime, so I don’t just know, I know how to do it because I have a lot of denial, but for me there’s no such thing as living serenely without survival.’ ‘I was disentangling myself from things I’d been trapped in, for me, we’re marked, those are my alchemical hypotheses.’ ‘It was more, like, witchcraft or I sometimes felt like someone wanted to hurt me, but it was really happening, so it wasn’t really psyching me out, because it was happening in my real life, it was more that I was sensing things, the things I’ve always sensed via my intuition, my instinct. I learned a lot about alchemy, about the universe and all that, so it may have aroused jealousy, envy of theft, whatever the crime. I know there’s always jealousy, but less so because I’ve communicated about criminality, so if someone’s jealous of me they realise how weird they are, well how weird do I think it is to tell them that I’m jealous of someone who’s been raped and attempted murdered? what does that say about me? I think it deters them from being jealous. So that’s why I’ve managed to get rid of all the jealousy and meanness that’s happened to me several times in my work life.’
2	Bullying	Suspiciousness	‘During the episode, I always had this paranoid fear of others.’
3	Bullying intimidation Discrimination Emotional neglect and abuse	Persecutory delusions Ideas of reference	‘I felt like I was being attacked by them.’ ‘I began to have… to hallucinate, telling myself that maybe there are people… who know what’s happened in my life… well, that’s what was going through my mind, so I could pass someone in the street and say to myself, maybe he knows me through so-and-so, he’s heard of me.’
7	Emotional abuse Intimidation and exclusion by a chief member of a spiritual group Death of a grandmother	Auditory-verbal hallucinations Delusion of control Spiritual ideas Somaesthetic hallucinations	‘I hear voices insulting me and uh and uh actually since my grandmother died I often hear her voice, but not all the time, and it was from time to time and it’s mostly in nature, and it’s like they’re trying to modify my grandmother’s voice too, to make her say things she’d never say to me, and that… that she never told me.’ ‘The tone of voice was modified, the content of what she said was modified and it’s especially sometimes, especially in the morning, I hear her voice screaming, as if they were torturing her, and that’s really hard, very often.’ ‘That they’re going to kill me, that they want to harm the earth, that they want to harm human beings, who are… some kind of demon.’ ‘It’s really with this woman that the voices started.’ ‘The woman’s voice became far too powerful, and I began to feel the physiological/physical consequences, on a sensory level, of what the voices were telling me they were going to do. Like, for example, we’re going to hurt you, we’re going to take your arm apart, and then I’d feel my arm physically twist. Since I have strong spiritual beliefs, for me it was evil spirits, or her.’ ‘I felt like my body was attached by a wire, connected to her, and she was telling me that she was going to hurt me, that she was going to hurt my family, that she was going to manipulate me, that I was going to die, and that she was going to do everything she could to push my suicide spiritually, because it’s very much linked to spirituality.’
9	Traumatic sports injuries forcing him to stop competing	Auditory-verbal hallucinations	‘At first I thought I was convinced that it was my grandparents who were talking, who were talking to each other, and who were saying, look at what (name) has become … well, there you go, he’s destroying his life, that’s what I said to myself.’
10	Sexual abuse before the age of 16 years old Strict religious upbringing Interpersonal tension with his parents	Auditory-verbal hallucinations Tactile distortions	‘I had two voices, a good voice that guided me towards Islam, and a voice, the voice of reason, and the voice of the heart that guided me towards Hinduism. This bad voice pulls me down, one day the good voice disappears, only the bad voice remains, I become anxious, I feel like committing suicide, I become stressed about everything, because it tries to force me to do things I don’t want to do. It changes my beliefs, so I can’t be Muslim anymore and I become Hindu.’ ‘If someone touches me, I feel like they’re embracing me. And if someone walks behind me, I feel like they’re embracing me too.’
11	Bullying intimidation	Suspicious ideas	‘So, we’ve experienced a certain amount of censorship, and it’s obvious that young people realise this and discuss it among themselves, which creates a feeling of insecurity when you can see everything that’s going on among us.’
12	Bullying Intimidation Discrimination Emotional neglect	Persecutory ideas	‘When I was walking in the street, I felt ashamed, so I imagined that the person walking by had turned their head to look at me, when in fact they hadn’t, and I inevitably interpreted that as bad, when in fact they hadn’t even turned their head. And it turns out that even if she did turn her head, it wasn’t necessarily negative, so I interpreted everything as bad and little by little, everything that happened was directed against me in fact, everything that happened.’
13	Abandonment and adoption Sexual abuse before the age of 16 years by his brother Bullying intimidation	Suspicious ideas	‘I thought he was with me and I thought he was against me and so all the time there was this arguing going on, in my brain it was in fusion, eh, it was in fusion, it was arguing between knowing uh am I going in this direction because if I’m going in this direction I can trust the people who point me in this direction… or if I go in this direction or if I trust such and such a person it can uh… I can’t go in a complicated situation.’
14	Emotional abuse Witnessing domestic violence Discrimination	Auditory-verbal hallucinations Intrapsychic hallucinations	‘At the beginning it was insults, it was that when I was on my own, when I was with my family I didn’t have these thoughts, but when I was on my own, I started to have lots of thoughts and I’d answer myself, for example, I remember going to work, and I’d have these thoughts while I was driving. And I’d answer myself while I was driving, and that’s when I started asking myself questions.’ ‘I had bad thoughts every time, well not bad thoughts, a lot I put myself down a lot in my thoughts and that played a lot on me.’
15	Witnessing domestic verbal violence Sexual abuse before the age of 16 years old	Auditory-verbal hallucinations with insults Tactile hallucinations	‘I don’t even know if there’s a link or not, except that one of the voices was insulting a lot and that reminds me of my family insulting each other, but that’s all.’ ‘There were times when I felt people touching my arm.’