JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

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:

The objectives are to (1) describe the design framework for let’s talk, including its Theory of Change; (2) conduct a process evaluation on data collected over the first three years of operation; and (3) summarize and discuss our learnings. The findings provide a replicable framework that may guide the design of similar platforms and inform impact evaluation studies.

Methods:

Key features of let’s talk include co-development with youths and mental health professionals, anonymity, trust and safety through moderation and government endorsement, and five dedicated pathways for key user journeys. 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 an estimated 51,636 non-bounced (meaningful activity) visitors, representing 5.2% of the platform’s target population of 17–35-year-olds in Singapore. In total, 17,158 users (33.2% 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 patterns revealed that professionally-moderated peer support and direct access to professionals were the primary drivers of sustained use, while features promoting self-directed activities had limited uptake.

Conclusions:

let’s talk achieved meaningful reach (5.2% of target population) and engagement through two key design principles: (1) low-barrier access to professional support via Ask-A-Therapist, and (2) training and empowering peer supporters as highly engaged community leaders. Our findings suggest that the core value proposition of platforms like let’s talk is human connection and expert guidance. Our framework and implementation learnings provide practical guidance for adapting this model to diverse cultural contexts.