Prevalence, dimensionality and clinical relevance of self‐disturbances and psychotic‐like experiences in Polish young adults: a latent class analysis approach.

OBJECTIVES: We aimed to investigate latent classes of psychotic‐like experiences (PLEs) and self‐disturbances (SD) and to explore mutual overlapping between derived subgroups. Further, our goal was to investigate class membership relationship with an exposure to childhood trauma and different psychopathological factors such as cognitive biases, depression, insomnia, psychiatric diagnosis and lifetime suicidality. METHODS: Participants consist of 3167 non‐clinical adults. We performed two latent class analyses (LCA), for PLEs and SD separately, to identify subgroups of individuals with different profiles on PLEs and SD. Associations between psychopathological factors and latent class membership were examined using multinomial logistic regression analysis. RESULTS: LCA produced 5 classes within SD and 3 classes within PLEs. Class of the highest endorsement of SD showed 53% overlap with class of the highest endorsement of PLEs. The highest risk of belonging to High Class for both SD and PLEs was associated in particular with depression, cognitive biases and insomnia. Trauma emerged as a significant predictor only for PLEs classes. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings confirm that high PLEs and SD co‐occur and are concentrated in a relatively small number of individuals, at least in the general population. Their combination may capture the highest risk of psychosis in the general population.