I know loads of people that I suspect are on the schizo spectrum and who have endured extremes of trauma, typically involving extended solitary confinement (which also applies to me as I endured 6 years of solitary confinement && have been a solitary person as an adult for most of my adult life, with brief exceptions). I'm diagnosed as PTSD with Secondary Psychosis, so while not on the schizo spectrum (other than traits of BPD, which used to be known as the "borderline" between neurotic and psychotic) I too have hallucinations && delusions.
My opinion (am not a therapist, just been doing this research for well over 16 years) that there are certain types of trauma that dissolve the connections in your brain at the neuronal level and create logical processing errors and continuity-of-reality errors. If you look up the statistics for solitary confinement most of them result in some type of psychosis, the longer you are isolated. Not that that happened to you but there are other traumatic factors that I would classify as causing similar damage (particularly along the lines of extended pain, isolation, repetitive sexual violation, etc.)
I would say this is probably a separate thing to actual schizophrenia, which is not something that we have mastered on a diagnostic level. (That is, we barely understand what schizophrenia is, and many people are misdiagnosed as schizophrenic.) Not saying that this is happening to you, as comorbid mental illnesses exist, but -> I'd say if there is extended trauma involved it should always be a priority on the clinician's side to view their patient through the lens of trauma first, psychosis whether positive or negative second -> especially as negative symptoms also overlap with PTSD symptoms.
I have RAD, which looks a lot like the 'negative side' of schizophrenia, especially at younger ages. Flat affect, emotionally blunted, socially isolated, "strange" & developmentally impaired (mostly in the realm of emotions and relational dynamics) in some way, etc. I'm smart enough that I can often "reason out" that I'm hallucinating, but sometimes I cannot tell the difference. My hallucinations are sometimes linked to trauma and sometimes totally random (like I see my arm as being huge, red, swollen, etc but I can somehow say "what if this is a hallucination?" and work backwards from there).
