Table 3.

Interviewees’ concerns

Participant pseudonym	Summary of concerns
James	At the time of interview he was particularly concerned about a work situation in which he worried that a particular person may have been conspiring against him for an unknown reason
Sukhi	Sukhi described feeling paranoid in many situations throughout her life, saying that she had a paranoid thinking style. However at the time of the interview she had fallen out with a family member leading her to become particularly paranoid about her close relationships. She worried about what others were saying and thinking
Sarah	Sarah had fallen out with a friend just before the interview. She was concerned that the friend was deliberately turning people against her. She described occasionally experiencing paranoia with regard to strangers (such as on public transport), but most usually in situations with known others
Lisa	Lisa was concerned about being excluded and plotted against in her work context at the time of interview. She said she experienced paranoia in most social contexts, mostly around known others such as colleagues
Marsha	Marsha was concerned about being intentionally excluded or talked about in a malicious way in relation to peer groups. She also reported the occasional thought that she could be in an altered reality where everything around her was purposely set up for her (as in the film The Truman show). When she was younger Marsha recalled thinking that she was being followed by animated cartoon characters and dangerous people that she had seen on the news
Kemi	Kemi reported that she only experienced paranoia with regard to strangers while out in public, but never in relation to friends or family. She was mostly concerned about being physically harmed in a random attack. Kemi said that she had felt much less distressed in recent times since she started regularly hearing the voice of God, who she felt would keep her safe and give her life meaning
Katrina	Katrina described experiencing paranoia in relation to strangers in public as an on‐going problem since her early teenage years. Her concerns about strangers ranged from being harmed psychologically (e.g., discovering she was being harshly judged) to being physically harmed. At age 16, she described a period of living in her own world, seeing and hearing ‘things’ and speaking to herself alone for hours at a time