The let’s talk Digital Peer Support Forum for Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing in Singapore: A Three-Year Process Evaluation and Framework Description (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Many countries face challenges in youth mental health, including stigma around help-seeking, limited accessibility to services, and undersupply of trained professionals. Online peer support platforms show promise in addressing these barriers. A government-supported platform called let’s talk launched in Singapore in 2022 to support youth aged 17-35. The anonymous and moderated forum allows youth to discuss mental health topics and life challenges with peers, peer supporters, and professionals. OBJECTIVE We aimed to (1) describe the design framework for let’s talk, including its Program Logic Model; (2) conduct a process evaluation on data collected over the first three years of operation; and (3) summarize and discuss our learnings. METHODS Key features of let’s talk include co-development with youths and mental health professionals, anonymity, trust and safety through scalable oversight, moderation, government endorsement, and five dedicated user journey pathways. Most notably, the Ask-A-Therapist pathway provides access to professional support on the forum and the Peer Supporter pathway trains and empowers youths to provide meaningful support to their peers. Process evaluation data were collected from 1 July 2022 to 30 June 2025. We analyzed platform-wide and feature-specific reach, engagement, and growth metrics by year. We documented learnings from implementation described by the platform development team. RESULTS In its first three years, let’s talk received 58,399 (±2 SD: 46,924-69,874) non-bounced (meaningful activity) visitors. In total, 17,158 users (29.4% of non-bounced visitors) created an account and 3,489 (20.3%) of those users posted at least once. The most popular feature of the platform was Ask-A-Therapist, which saw 1,548 original (thread-starting) questions posted from 1,037 unique users and a total of 6,865 posts (61.9% of all posting activity). The 156 Peer Supporters were the most active users, representing 0.9% of all registered users yet contributing 2,175 posts (19.6% of all posting activity). The let’s talk features aiming to bridge the online-offline divide and to encourage self-care training were not popularly used. Engagement was concentrated in professionally-moderated peer support and direct access to professionals, while features promoting self-directed activities had limited uptake. CONCLUSIONS Over its first three years, engagement within let’s talk concentrated in features offering human support, particularly low-barrier access to professionals through Ask-A-Therapist and replies from trained Peer Supporters, while self-directed features saw limited uptake. The platform appears to have functioned both as a peer support community and as a low-barrier route to professional guidance, and the features that attracted most engagement were also those requiring sustained staff capacity. These findings describe platform use, not user outcomes; evaluation of wellbeing outcomes and equity of access is needed, and adaptation of this model elsewhere will depend on local context.