MindEval2 is a new evaluation framework for AI chatbots in mental health support, comprising Mental Health Quality Rubrics (MHQR) and the MindSim patient simulation harness. MHQR, developed with PhD-level psychologists, provides explicit, actionable criteria for assessing response quality, while MindSim offers realistic, longitudinal patient interactions with a memory component. The study evaluated 18 models, finding that although surface-level quality has improved, guidance calibration remains the main failure across all models.
arXiv:2606. 30887v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models show promise for mental health support, yet therapeutic quality improves only when evaluation functions as an actionable control signal rather than a passive metric.
arXiv:2510.25384v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are promising tools for synthetic data generation in mental health. However, privacy policies and restrictions forced...
Graph2Counsel is a framework that generates synthetic counseling dialogues by leveraging Client Psychological Graphs (CPGs) to encode the relationships among a client’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. The system uses a structured prompting pipeline guided by counselor strategies and explores techniques such as Chain‑of‑Thought and Multi‑Agent Feedback to produce 760 realistic sessions from 76 CPGs. Expert evaluation shows the dataset surpasses previous ones in specificity, counselor competence, authenticity, conversational flow, and safety, and fine‑tuning an open‑source model on it improves performance on several counseling benchmarks.
The article surveys how large language models (LLMs) are being applied to mental health, outlining a three‑phase evolution: Phase I uses LLMs as passive information tools and pattern recognizers for assessment; Phase II employs them as empathetic conversationalists for stateless, in‑the‑moment interactions; Phase III aims to create longitudinal, personalized companions that act as stateful cognitive agents. It systematically reviews core technologies, agent architectures (Profile, Memory, Reasoning, Planning), and the datasets and benchmarks that support this progression, offering a coherent narrative and roadmap for future research. The survey also provides a curated resource list at https://github.com/Emo-gml/Awesome-Mental-Health-LLMs.
arXiv:2509. 02594v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating large language models (LLMs) on their ability to generate high-quality, accurate, situationally aware answers to clinical questions requires going beyond conventional benchmarks to assess how these systems behave in complex, high-stakes clinical scenarios.
arXiv:2607. 24754v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to provide mental health support, requiring reliable evaluation of safety, empathy, and therapeutic appropriateness.
arXiv:2607. 08257v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on isolated psychiatric tasks, including dialogue, diagnosis, and treatment planning, yet existing benchmarks rarely simulate complete psychiatric clinical encounters.
arXiv:2607. 25681v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cognitive distortion amplifies negative emotions and contributes to mental health disorders.
arXiv:2610.09209v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Substance Use Disorder (SUD) counseling requires patient responses that reflect underlying cognitive states such as beliefs, coping strategies, and rea...
The paper introduces ImpactBench, an open, expert-guided platform designed to measure the multi-dimensional impact of generative AI on users. It evaluates AI models across psychological, physical, and social wellbeing metrics derived from domain experts and existing benchmarks, using simulated multi-turn conversations with teen and adult scenarios. Ten leading LLMs were tested on 48,540 conversations, showing 68.7% promotion of desirable behaviors but only 53.1% avoidance of harms, with an 83.3% agreement rate between automated judges and expert reviewers.
The paper evaluates the safety of conversational AI therapy bots for Generation Alpha, revealing that while these models understand 76‑82% of youth‑specific vocabulary, they correctly assess clinical risk only 64‑72% of the time, creating a significant vocabulary‑comprehension gap. Six failure patterns—such as sarcasm masking, minimization acceptance, and semantic drift—were identified, with compounded errors leading to a 94% miss rate when three or more patterns co‑occur. The authors estimate 146,880 missed crises annually and recommend mandatory human‑in‑the‑loop systems, quarterly youth‑specific validation, transparent performance disclosure, and regulatory oversight for youth‑facing mental health AI.
The paper introduces a retrieval‑augmented multi‑agent framework that automatically generates instance‑specific evaluation rubrics for medical language models. By retrieving authoritative medical evidence, decomposing it into atomic facts, and combining these with user interaction constraints, the system produces fine‑grained criteria that outperform GPT‑4o on HealthBench and LLMEval‑Med. The generated rubrics also guide response refinement, improving medical LLM output quality by 9.2%.