arXiv:2607. 22692v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for emotional support despite lacking mechanisms to safely govern evolving mental health risk.
By Anabela C. Areias, Catarina Botelho, Ant\'onio Farinhas, Areti Vassilopoulos, Dora Janela, Xin Tong, Nuno M. Guerreiro, Maya D'Eon, Fab\'iola Costa, Ricardo Rei
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.
By Manisha Mehta, Virendra Mehta
arXiv:2607. 24817v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Digital mental health interventions (DMHIs) offer scalable support, but ensuring they accurately detect users' intent during volatile situations can be challenging.
By Anand Gupta, Akshat Surolia, Shubham Mishra, Shakil Imtiaz, Chaitali Sinha
arXiv:2602. 05088v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Millions of people now use generative AI chatbots for psychological support.
By Kate H. Bentley, Luca Belli, Adam M. Chekroud, Emily J. Ward, Emily R. Dworkin, Emily Van Ark, Kelly M. Johnston, Will Alexander, Millard Brown, Matt Hawrilenko
arXiv:2606. 18129v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent incidents involving LLMs used for mental-health support reveal a critical evaluation gap: surface-level safety scores do not capture how models behave across realistic, emotionally sensitive interactions over time.
By Abeer Badawi, Moyosoreoluwa Olatosi, Negin Baghbanzadeh, Laleh Seyyed-Kalantari, Frank Rudzicz, R. Shayna Rosenbaum, Sara Pishdadian, Elham Dolatabadi
arXiv:2606. 10380v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world crisis intervention is inherently conversational, yet existing research largely focuses on static texts.
By Grace Byun, Abigail Lott, Rebecca Lipschutz, Sean T. Minton, Elizabeth A. Stinson, Jinho D. Choi
The paper reviews how large language models are applied in mental health, covering areas such as social media analysis, clinical conversational agents, therapy support tools, prompt engineering, and multimodal learning. It synthesizes interdisciplinary studies that use social media posts, electronic medical records, and multimodal inputs to detect depression, assess suicide risk, provide personalized therapy, and generate psychoeducational content. The review also discusses advances in model interpretability, annotation strategies, multimodal fusion techniques, and highlights ethical, sociotechnical, and regulatory challenges while proposing frameworks for safe, equitable, and accountable deployment.
By Yisong Chen, Yifan Gao, Sijing Yu, Chuqing Zhao, Yang Lu
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.
By Mizanur Rahman, Abeer Badawi, Elahe Rahimi, Laleh Seyyed-Kalantari, Frank Rudzicz, Enamul Hoque, Elham Dolatabadi
arXiv:2608. 06110v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents ECHO (Enhanced Care \& Health Observer), a locally-deployable conversational health assistant for long-term chronic care management.
By Abdulkadir K\"ul\c{c}e, Alihan Esen, Ca\u{g}la Fikir, Berke Kurt, Kuzey Arar, G\"okhan Ercan, Faik Boray Tek
arXiv:2605. 08827v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The safety of mental health AI is often judged at the wrong temporal scale.
By Srimonti Dutta, Ratna Kandala
The paper surveys 61 studies on mental‑health AI and identifies a misalignment in how trust is evaluated across disciplines. It proposes a three‑layer framework—human‑oriented, interaction‑oriented, and AI‑oriented trust—and maps stakeholder perspectives onto these layers. The authors argue that future research should focus on calibrating human trust to actual interaction and AI trustworthiness rather than merely maximizing perceived trust.
By Xin Sun, Yue Su, Yifan Mo, Qingyu Meng, Yuxuan Li, Min Chen, Mengyuan Zhang, Saku Sugawara, Charlotte Gerritsen, Sander L. Koole, Koen Hindriks, Jiahuan Pei
arXiv:2607. 01153v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety evaluations for language models increasingly depend on judgments about ambiguous natural-language behaviour: whether a model followed an instruction, refused appropriately, complied with a policy, or misreported progress in an agentic task.
By Brett Reynolds