Recruitment
mental illness
To advertise the PoET, a flyer was distributed on social media and two articles were published in newspapers. Those interested could contact an email address to receive further information about the training and to apply. Participants for the control group were also recruited via social media. As PoET is a low-threshold intervention, there were no exclusion criteria for participation and no screening for mental illness before the start. Any person older than 18 years could participate. Psychology students could get VPN hours as compensation. Overall, nearly 600 people were interested in participating. Because the number of psychologists to conduct training sessions was limited, not everyone got the possibility to participate. Places in the intervention study were not randomly allocated, but according to the principle “first-come, first-served”. Participants of the control group did not receive any treatment initially, but were offered to participate in one of the next PoETs.