Digital Mental Health Literacy and Wellbeing: A Four-Month School-Based Evaluation of the Zoala Platform Across Secondary Schools in Asia

Adolescents across Asia face rising mental-health challenges alongside limited access to school-based psychological support. Digital wellbeing platforms offer a scalable pathway for early intervention, psychoeducation, and self-directed emotional support. This study evaluates the impact of Zoala, a digital mental-health platform deployed across more than 30 secondary schools in Asia over a four-month period (August–November 2025). A total of 1,479 wellbeing submissions and 510 mental-health literacy (MHL) responses were analyzed to assess month-to-month changes in emotional, behavioral, and cognitive indicators of youth wellbeing.One-way ANOVAs revealed statistically significant improvements across all six wellbeing domains—emotional, family, peer, physical, self-esteem, and learning wellbeing—although effects were small, reflecting the early-stage nature of short-term digital interventions in school settings. Notably, scores were consistently higher in November, suggesting a potential buffering effect during examination stress periods. Effects were strongest in peer and learning wellbeing, highlighting the platform’s capacity to support school-related functioning.MHL outcomes demonstrated robust cognitive gains, with significant differences observed across all five domains: help-seeking attitudes, mental-health information knowledge, self-treatment knowledge, awareness of mental-health services, and recognition of mental-health challenges. Effect sizes ranged from small to medium, with particularly strong gains in knowledge-based components, aligning with research showing that digital psychoeducation rapidly enhances cognitive elements of mental-health literacy.Overall, the findings provide evidence that a short-term digital mental-health intervention can produce measurable improvements in adolescent wellbeing and accelerate mental-health literacy development across diverse educational settings in Asia. These results support the role of digital platforms as scalable, culturally adaptable components of school wellbeing systems, with the potential for amplified effects through longer-term or more structured integration into the school environment.