*2.3. Materials*

Sociodemographic information was collected with a questionnaire developed ad hoc that included items on gender, age, marital status, education level, substance use, socioeconomic status, psychiatric diagnosis, presence of any other pathology, time spent in the community, and relationships with family.

Validated and reliable measures were used to assess the patients' cognitive functions, psychiatric symptoms, and several specific areas of functioning. Cognitive domains (orientation to time and space, registration of three words, attention, and calculation, recall of three words, language, and visual construction) were measured with the MMSE [19]. Psychiatric symptoms were measured with the 24-item Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale [20]. The K Axis [21] was used to measure the patients' overall functioning and functioning in several specific areas, with each area of functioning scored on a continuum of 100 points according to a decreasing order of severity (0 = very severe compression; 100 = high function). The investigated areas were as follows: (1) Psychological impairment; (2) Social skills; (3) Violence; (4) ADL-Occupational skills (5) Substance abuse; (6) Compromising of physical conditions: Medical impairment; (7) Ancillary impairment (legal, financial, milieu).

COVID-19 risk perception was measured with three items adapted from Cho and Lee [22]. Five items evaluated negative mood due to restrictive measures carried out in the community.

For social support, the shorter version of the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS) [23] was used. The short version used in the present research contains three items ranked from 1 (not agree at all) to 7 (agree at all).

#### *2.4. Statistical Analyses*

ANOVA with repeated measures was used to compare the scores of the clinical scales in two different periods (NoCot vs. Cot). Statistical analyses were performed using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS; version 25.0; IBM SPSS, Armonk, NY, USA). In the pairwise comparisons, the Bonferroni correction for alpha inflation was performed.
