Public Consultation 2026: Singapore's National Mental Health & Wellbeing Strategy

On 21 January 2026, SG Mental Health Matters (SGMHM) launched a community-led public consultation in partnership with Rice Media, to examine how Singapore’s National Mental Health & Well-Being Strategy - introduced in 2023 - is being experienced in everyday life. The consultation focuses on public awareness, lived experience, and trust across key areas of the Strategy, including public mental health promotion, workplace well-being, and civic engagement.

Unlike earlier government consultations that focused on policy design, this initiative centres on post-implementation learning - recognising that meaningful policy improvement must occur while programmes are unfolding, not only after they conclude. Through a national survey to be launched before 12 February 2026 in partnership with independent research company OPPi, group discussions, and public engagement activities across 2026, the consultation seeks to surface gaps between policy intent and lived reality, and to generate practical recommendations to refine the Strategy and strengthen implementation.

This consultation is designed as a participatory policy evaluation and civic engagement exercise, enabling citizens to contribute constructively to implementation as it happens. Participants will be informed how their input will be used, when findings will be shared, and why their contribution matters. Findings and updates will be shared publicly to support ongoing dialogue, accountability, and meaningful citizen participation in mental health policy.

Watch this space for details of the Public Consultation!

In 2023, a bold commitment was made to bring together suicide survivors, researchers, practitioners, employers and community groups to develop a National Strategy on Suicide Prevention in Singapore. Calling for ‘no life to be lost to suicide’, SG Mental Health Matters led a ground-up initiative named “Project Hayat” (‘life’ in Malay).

Project Hayat is a community-led effort, guided by a multi-stakeholder Work Group comprising policymakers, suicide experts, researchers, community workers and helping professionals, religious leaders, corporate leaders, representatives from the media, and people whose lives have been impacted by suicide. 

Commemorating World Suicide Prevention Day on 10 September 2024, the Project Hayat Working Group has published a White Paper outlining key recommendations for a national strategy for suicide prevention from a first of its kind research on suicide prevention in Singapore. 

This is an ongoing initiative - find out more on 'Suicide Prevention' page. 

Explore our key findings:

• Methodology
• OPPi Opinion Groups
• COVID-19 and Mental Health
• Common Ground Sentiments
• Mental Health Divides
• Barriers to Accessing Mental Healthcare
• Recommendations

Download our full report

Download our summary report

In 2021, we ran the #AreWeOkay poll ran from 26 March 2021 to 30 April 2021, which was intended to spark a conversation on mental health among Singaporeans amid the pandemic as part of public consultation 2021.  A total of 561 responses were gathered throughout this poll period.  

This poll was launched on OPPi, an AI-powered crowdsourcing platform with proprietary analytic and statistical capabilities and involved a series of demographic questions and statements to which participants could respond to, including topics on perceptions of mental healthcare, vulnerable communities, COVID-19 on mental health, and mental health and society. Our findings provide deeper insight into issues of access, affordability, and quality of mental healthcare in Singapore a year into the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings suggest a need to further support and address the pressing concern surrounding mental health more holistically. 

Explore our key findings:

• Accessibility
• Affordability
• Quality
• Schools
• Workplaces
• Communities

Introduction

As an effort to document the experiences and feedback of all Singaporeans on the access, affordability and mental healthcare and support in Singapore, Nominated Member of Parliament Anthea Ong and her team of volunteers launched the first-ever public consultation on mental health, for the purposes of supporting her on the Budget 2020 debates. From December 2019 to January 2020, we have received 395 responses from ordinary Singaporeans of all walks of life. These respondents include people with lived experiences of mental health issues, caregivers and mental health professionals.

Our public consultation looked at accessibility, affordability and quality (AAQ) of mental healthcare in Singapore, with various inter-connected focus areas across: (a) settings: schools and workplaces; (b) vulnerable communities: migrant workers, differently-abled, LGBTQIA+, and low-income elderly; and (c) specific concerns: confidentiality, suicide, emergency services, and trauma. 

In the course of our work, we were mindful to look (i) beyond mental health conditions to thinking about its systemic and cultural roots, honing in on preventive upstream work and promoting mental wellness; (ii) beyond people with lived experiences of mental health conditions to the role of everyone across the whole of Singaporean society: from individuals, to families, to employers, to and communities and civil society, to government; and (iii) how our systems and policies can better meet the unique individual needs towards better mental health and wellness.

This public consultation is not an official study aligned to rigorous standards of academic research. It is entirely volunteer-run, and the responses we received are derived from online media and social media platforms where the electronic form for the consultation was shared. Apart from supporting Anthea in the Budget 2020 debates, the public consultation is not affiliated with any political, public, private or social service interests; including the Government, VWOs, business enterprises or political organisations.
Within this website, aggregated data from the public consultation is published, with individual anonymised quotes supporting the statistics. The team has taken the decision to not publish the entire dataset from the consultation as (a) some respondents have indicated that they do not consent to individual responses being shared in any form (b) although some respondents have indicated they consent to their responses being shared as anonymised quotes, no explicit consent was provided for sharing their responses on this particular website (c) to maintain the safe space we have created for our respondents to share their honest feedback openly with us. 

In the spirit of transparency,  we are open to reviewing individual requests for more information. Any information released will be subject to the consent of all respondents involved. For these requests of information, you may contact us through the “Contact” section of this website.