Principal Findings
mood disorder, psychosis
RECRUITMENT
This paper has presented an analysis of baseline participant characteristics in the NEON Trial and NEON-O Trial and explored their relationship with self-reported lifetime specialist mental health service use. Having used specialist services versus not having used specialist services were explained by a broad range of sociodemographic and clinical characteristics in both trials. Where there were statistically significant differences in clinical outcome data collected at baseline, specialist service users as a group always had poorer outcomes, although NEON Trial specialist service users self-identified as being further through the recovery process than people who had not used specialist services. For the NEON Trial, prior specialist service users were less likely than current specialist service users to be still experiencing psychosis as their main mental health problem and more likely to identify a mood disorder as their main mental health problem. Participants in the NEON trials were recruited from all regions of England, including in the North East and Yorkshire where there were no hospital-based recruitment sites and, hence, where participants were likely recruited through online mechanisms. The recruited participants covered all available educational levels and employment types. This provides collective evidence that the recruitment method chosen (hybrid online and offline) reached a broad range of trial participants and, hence, is advisable for trials seeking to reach underrepresented groups.