In the realm of mental health support chatbots, it is vital to show empathy and encourage self-exploration to provide tailored solutions. However, current approaches tend to provide general insights or solutions without fully understanding the help-seeker's situation. Therefore, we propose PsyMix, a chatbot that integrates the analyses of the seeker's state from the perspective of a psychotherapy approach (Chain-of-Psychotherapies, CoP) before generating the response, and learns to incorporate the strength of various psychotherapies by fine-tuning on a mixture of CoPs. Through comprehensive evaluation, we found that PsyMix can outperform the ChatGPT baseline, and demonstrate a comparable level of empathy in its responses to that of human counselors.
@article{arxiv.2409.19533,
title = {Mixed Chain-of-Psychotherapies for Emotional Support Chatbot},
author = {Siyuan Chen and Cong Ming and Zhiling Zhang and Yanyi Chen and Kenny Q. Zhu and Mengyue Wu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.19533},
year = {2024}
}