Nearly 8 in 10 Singaporeans with anxiety or depression never see a professional. Most would rather talk to a peer. That should change how we think about mental health support.
The numbers come from a Duke-NUS study this week: of adults here with symptoms of anxiety or depression, 77% had not sought professional help. But 62% said they would accept support from peers who shared their background or lived experience.
Read that again. The people we are trying to reach are mostly not coming through the clinic door. And they are telling us, plainly, where they would rather be met.
It tracks with something from my own training. A well-known model estimates the specific therapeutic technique — the thing we train years to do well — accounts for only around 15% of whether a client gets better. Most of the rest comes from the client's own life, the relationship, and their own hope. We hold these figures loosely. But the shape of them is hard to unsee: most of what helps a person heal happens outside the room.
I've always sat uneasily with how isolated therapy can be. The closed door, the confidentiality, the professional distance. I understand why it's built that way, and I value it. But if so much of recovery happens outside that room, shouldn't we pay attention to the outside too?
This is the thinking behind how we're building community mental wellness at NRCS. Counselling is one tool. An important one. But a single layer in something larger.
It starts upstream — helping a community become more relational, more honest about its own limits, more willing to ask for help before things break. The support that follows can look like many things: a casual conversation that goes somewhere real, an intentional visit, a closed-door session, or a referral to specialised care. Different doors, same intent. Meet people before crisis is the only language left.
Working this way takes a certain audacity. It means accepting that some lines, drawn cleanly in a textbook, get blurrier in a real community. It means valuing hybrid roles — people who can hold a counselling posture in a coffee conversation, who move between formal and informal without losing either. None of this is done casually. It demands extreme care and sensitivity, a clear sense of where the boundaries still are and why. It doesn't change what counselling is. But it does change the shape of help, the shape of care.
For a long time the mental health conversation has been about catching people who are falling. Necessary work. But peer support points to something more ambitious — not just supporting people who are struggling, but helping build a community that is emotionally well in the first place.
Less firefighting. More building something that doesn't burn down so easily. That's the community I want to help build.