Table 1.

Additional, representative examples of quotes from participants for each of the themes.

Identity Themes	Quotations from CHR participants	Quotations from HC participants
Defining a Self-Concept	“I’ve never really been sociable because I never really got the point of socializing. I see people socializing, and I’m just like, “Do we really need to socialize?” And that really shaped me today because I guess I wouldn’t say I’m having trouble socializing, but just I try to avoid it.” [10] “College isn’t for me. School is not for me. School has never been for me. I haven’t been the straight-A student, so college isn’t for me. I knew that I was going into college, and then after the first semester, I kind of just failed everything. It kind of confirmed my suspicions. I’m not saying like, oh, I came in with the mindset of thinking like, oh, I’m going to fail anyway. I’m not even going to try. I did try. I tried my hardest to do everything the right-- well, I still end up failing, and I’m just like, you know what? It’s not for me. It really causes a lot of stress, causes all of this, causes this and this and that, and I was just like, yeah. I don’t want to do this anymore.” [32] “I’m not a people person. I don’t like spending—I don’t like pretending I care about people. It has to be someone that cares or can pretend to care about other people, and I can’t do that.” [22] “I’m divided into two different people. I’m a rational person, and then I’m an irrational person.” [36]	“I’m very social, so I like interacting with people and talking to people and being around people.” [11] “This is different because I’m usually a morning person. am a morning person.” [01] “I’m the kind of person that has a few friends, but they’re very close to me, and they’re very important to me.” [14] “I like it because I’m a music person. I listen to music almost all day.” [15] “Nerves are kind of an absence in my life. I never feel nervous or stressed to a large capacity. And I’ve just been like that the whole way.” [12]

Identity Themes	Quotations from CHR participants
Creativity	“To now, it’s really unknown, to be honest, because I now have interest to become maybe a singer, or be an actor, or to be a writer, to now also being a photographer.” [13] “And I would just make music that I would want to listen to or that people can rap over or something or sing over. And I made a few albums, and yeah. But it definitely ties in with graphic design because I’ll usually make the music off an image. So I would have the cover, like the album art first, and then I would make the music based off that.” [28] “I invest my time mostly in songwriting, and screenplays, dance. Well, I want to make them a career. So for now, they’re like investments and I’m putting a lot of hours into it. I’m relaxed at this state. I’m just letting it flow. I just wrote a screenplay, so I’m trying to get it out. It was very ecstatic because of the way I write. I have a notebook. I got inspired. And then I started journaling, and it sounded like a book. And then I’m like, oh my god, this sounds like it could be a movie.” [06] “I rap and sing and do some movement and poetry and sometimes, depending on the venue, we project images behind me. And I have a few things that I’ve created just for that. So it’s like a multimedia kind of experience.” [21]
Identity Development/Formation	“It was typical existential dread. I was like, who am I? What am I? Do I like boys? Do I like girls? Do I like anime? Do I like TV? Do I like newspapers? Do I like food? And then also, what am I going to be when I grow up?” [23] (Identity development category: moratorium) “I didn’t really have a strong sense of identity. My identity was always what other people made it. It’s weird. I’m still trying to figure all that out.” [42] (Identity development category: moratorium) “The thing that terrifies me the most is this uncertainly in my own head because it’s like your head makes you who you are. And your thoughts, your consciousness culminates who you are and what you do in life and stuff and your sense of identity. But if I’m not in tune with that, then what can I be in tune with?” [44] (Identity development category: diffusion) “I thought I was this one person, and then I was like, wow. I’m so many different people.” [06] (Identity development category: moratorium) “I’ve always been someone that I can do anything, I don’t need to be passionate about it. I’ll do it. It’s just I get so jealous about being [someone] who have this one passion. And I get so jealous. I wish I had this passion and I’m dying for it. I don’t have that because I feel like I can do anything. And I’m interested in so many things that-- I don’t know. That’s why I feel like I don’t know what to do next.” [03] (Identity development category: moratorium)
Feeling Different from Others	“Yeah. It’s, to be honest, really interesting to see their stories, and just to see mine, how they are similar, or how they are different.” [13] “I feel like my whole system of thinking is so different from everybody else’s.” [43] “I don’t know what I should tell people and what I shouldn’t because I don’t know-- yeah, I don’t know what’s normal and what’s not. So I don’t know. Something that I think is abnormal might not be abnormal to somebody else, or somebody that I think is totally normal is not normal to somebody else.” [36] “I always had a different perspective on things. I always wanted to do things a different way.” [41] “Some people feel the-- some people don’t feel depressed as frequently as me, and so when I talk about depressing things it’s not a big part of their life, so when I bring it up it has a lot more impact on them. Or it’s very new to them. Whereas, for me, it’s whatever. Because it’s every day for me, so.” [26]
Change from a Former Self	“I think that I was a very socially receptive person, maybe. And I don’t know. I think I had more of myself to give. But now I don’t. That kind of sucks.” [43] “I would rather stay in my room or something. Or I used to go to music festivals a lot. And those would be super fun. I would look forward to them. And then the last one I went to was in July, and I just don’t even remember any of it because I just remember being there and just feeling like, this is the least fun thing that I could be doing right now. And it used to be one of the favorite things that I would do with my friends. And it didn’t make me excited.” [19] “I’m certainly not the same person I was four years ago.” [24]

Note. CHR=Clinical High Risk for Psychosis. HC=Healthy Control.

Full qualitative data can be found in Supplemental Table 1.