Related papers: Facilitating Self-Guided Mental Health Interventio…
Interfaces for interacting with large language models (LLMs) are often designed to mimic human conversations, typically presenting a single response to user queries. This design choice can obscure the probabilistic and predictive nature of…
With the growing prevalence of psychological interventions, it is vital to have measures which rate the effectiveness of psychological care to assist in training, supervision, and quality assurance of services. Traditionally, quality…
Millions of people participate in online peer-to-peer support sessions, yet there has been little prior research on systematic psychology-based evaluations of fine-grained peer-counselor behavior in relation to client satisfaction. This…
Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has opened new possibilities for mental health support, yet current approaches lack realism in simulating specialized psychotherapy and fail to capture therapeutic progression over time.…
Associative memory engages in the integration of relevant information for comprehension in the human cognition system. In this work, we seek to improve alignment between language models and human brain while processing speech information by…
Online, people often recount their experiences turning to conversational AI agents (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot) for mental health support -- going so far as to replace their therapists. These anecdotes suggest that AI agents have great…
This paper presents ChatCounselor, a large language model (LLM) solution designed to provide mental health support. Unlike generic chatbots, ChatCounselor is distinguished by its foundation in real conversations between consulting clients…
Amidst the growing interest in developing task-autonomous AI for automated mental health care, this paper addresses the ethical and practical challenges associated with the issue and proposes a structured framework that delineates levels of…
Dialogue systems are increasingly integrated into mental health support to help clients facilitate exploration, gain insight, take action, and ultimately heal themselves. A practical and user-friendly dialogue system should be…
The therapeutic working alliance is a critical predictor of psychotherapy success. Traditionally, working alliance assessment relies on questionnaires completed by both therapists and patients. In this paper, we present COMPASS, a novel…
In cognitive psychology, automatic and self-reinforcing irrational thought patterns are known as cognitive distortions. Left unchecked, patients exhibiting these types of thoughts can become stuck in negative feedback loops of unhealthy…
Dialogue systems controlled by predefined or rule-based scenarios derived from counseling techniques, such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), play an important role in mental health apps. Despite the need for responsible responses, it…
Substance use disorders (SUDs) affect millions of people, and relapses are common, requiring multi-session treatments. Access to care is limited, which contributes to the challenge of recovery support. We present \textbf{ChatThero}, an…
Mental models play an important role in whether user interaction with intelligent systems, such as dialog systems is successful or not. Adaptive dialog systems present the opportunity to align a dialog agent's behavior with heterogeneous…
Suicide is a pressing global issue, demanding urgent and effective preventive interventions. Among the various strategies in place, psychological support hotlines had proved as a potent intervention method. Approximately two million people…
Medical consultations are intrinsically speech-centric. However, most prior works focus on long-text-based interactions, which are cumbersome and patient-unfriendly. Recent advances in speech language models (SpeechLMs) have enabled more…
Mental health challenges are increasing worldwide, straining emotional support services and leading to counselor overload. This can result in delayed responses during critical situations, such as suicidal ideation, where timely intervention…
Self-consciousness, the introspection of one's existence and thoughts, represents a high-level cognitive process. As language models advance at an unprecedented pace, a critical question arises: Are these models becoming self-conscious?…
Large language models (LLMs) are transforming research on machine learning while galvanizing public debates. Understanding not only when these models work well and succeed but also why they fail and misbehave is of great societal relevance.…
Large language models (LLMs) are already being piloted for clinical use in hospital systems like NYU Langone, Dana-Farber and the NHS. A proposed deployment use case is psychotherapy, where a LLM-powered chatbot can treat a patient…