mental health; (2) understanding mental disorders and their treatments; (3) decreasing stigma related to mental disorders; (4) enhancing help-seeking efficacy (knowing when, where, and how to obtain good mental health care and developing competencies needed for self-care) [2, 5]. Thus, MHL provides the necessary foundation for mental health promotion, prevention, and care, and binds these essential components into a seamless construct focused on improving both mental health and mental health care outcomes rather than focusing singly on promotion of wellbeing [3, 6, 7]. It is now widely appreciated that about 70 % of mental disorders can be diagnosed prior to age 25 years and that they comprise the single largest component of disease burden during the second decade of the life span [8, 9]. To effectively address youth mental health, it is essential that MHL becomes a focus of mental health interventions for young people. Without a good MHL foundation, young people will not be well prepared to successfully travel the developmental pathway into adulthood and beyond. Recent evidence further demonstrates that improved mental health knowledge and decreased stigma are two essential components to facilitate help-seeking behaviors and early identification of mental disorders [10, 11]. Since most young people are enrolled in schools, schools have been recognized as an important venue to address student mental health [12] and recently with special focus on MHL in both Europe and Canada [13–15]. Recently, this importance of addressing school mental health has been further recognized by the European Commission [16] and European Joint Action on Mental Health and Wellbeing 2016 (mentalhealthandwellbeing.eu) [17]. A great number of school-based mental health interventions have been applied in Europe. For example, Weare and Nind [18] identified and analyzed more than 500 school According to the World Health Organization (WHO), health literacy is key to improving health outcomes for both individuals and populations [1]. Mental health literacy (MHL), a component of health literacy can be expected to have similar impacts [2]. Our understanding of MHL has evolved from its early development as a tool to enhance the recognition of mental disorders [3] to a more complex consideration, consistent with the WHO’s construct of health literacy as a social determinant of health and an educationally driven intervention with demonstrated positive impact on the health outcomes of individuals and populations, as well as a vehicle that can be applied to help transform health inequities [1, 4]. As such, MHL has been conceptualized as comprising four distinct but related components: (1) understanding how to obtain and maintain good