**2. Materials and Methods**

#### *2.1. Participants*

NoiBene was publicized through the official Sapienza website on a page devoted to promoting well-being services. Participation was voluntary and free of charge. NoiBene was presented as a guided self-help program to develop some useful skills to cope with the well-being challenges brought about by the pandemic. Informed consent about the research protocol was presented to every student that asked to follow the program. Twenty-one students did not accept to be included in the study, so they used the program, but their data were excluded from the analysis. The final sample was composed of four-hundred-andfifty-four (*n* = 454) students, aged from 19 to 54 (M = 24.80; SD = 4.10), with a majority being female (M = 68; F = 386). Most of the students live with their parents (63.1%), with flatmates (25.3%) and a minority with their partners (5.7%), alone (3.7%) or with a brother or sister (1.1%). The majority of participants (61.7%) were enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine and Psychology and were completing a Master's degree course (59%). About 35.9% of the students never sought psychological help, 15.9% had accessed mental health treatment in the past, and 6.8% were in ongoing therapy. About 41.4% did not give this information.

#### *2.2. Measures*

To assess psychological distress, we administered, to every student, the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised, SCL-90-R [35,36], a multidimensional self-report inventory covering nine dimensions of psychological distress: somatization (SOM—distress arising from bodily perceptions), obsessive-compulsive (OC—thoughts, impulses, and actions that are experienced as irresistible), interpersonal sensitivity (IS—feelings of personal inadequacy and inferiority, and distress during interpersonal interactions), depression (DEP—symptoms of depressive syndromes), anxiety (ANX—symptoms that are associated with manifest anxiety), hostility (HOS—thoughts and feelings of anger, irritability, and resentment), phobic anxiety (PHOB—persistent fear response to a specific person, place, object, or situation that leads to avoidance or escape behaviour), paranoid ideation (PAR—projective thinking, hostility, suspiciousness, and centrality), and psychoticism (PSY—withdrawal, isolation, and schizoid lifestyle). It also included three global indices of psychological distress: the Global Severity Index (GSI—index of overall psychological distress), the Positive Symptom Distress Index (PSDI—index of the intensity of symptoms), and the Positive Symptoms

Total (PST—number of self-reported symptoms). The scores were converted to standard T-scores using the norm group appropriate for the participants. T-scores between 55 and 65 suggested moderate to elevated symptomatology; T-scores above 65 suggested elevated symptoms. The Symptom Checklist-90-Revised is an established instrument and has several studies supporting its reliability and validity. Its test-retest reliability has been reported at 0.80 to 0.90 with a time interval of one week. All nine primary subscales correlate with other broad-range inventories [35]. The Italian translation and validation showed Cronbach α values from 0.68 to 0.87 for the nine dimensions [36]. In our study, the Cronbach α ranged from 0.77 to 0.91 for the nine dimensions.

Moreover, every student completed an ad hoc questionnaire to collect demographic data (i.e., age, occupation, residence) and information about their academic status (i.e., faculty, degree course).
