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:2601.09721v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Consumer artificial intelligence chatbots are now accessed by hundreds of millions of users seeking health information, yet systematic evalua...
By Vahideh Zolfaghari, Leila Mashhadi, Mitra Ahadi, Farzaneh Sedaghatkar, MohammadReza Kargozari
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:2604.25415v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: People increasingly turn to general-purpose AI chatbots for advice about emotional and mental health problems, but the ability of these syste...
By Veith Weilnhammer, Lennart Luettgau, Christopher Summerfield, Raymond Dolan, Elise Wilkinson, Virginia Corno, Viknesh Sounderajah, Matthew M Nour
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:2609.15855v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: % !TEX root = ../main.tex People increasingly use large language models (LLMs) for mental health support, yet their safety in evolving, high-risk con...
By Laura M. Vowels, Matthew J. Vowels, Shivali Sharma, Apoorv Jha, Rehnuma Choudhury, Wasseem El Sarraj, Rachel Francois-Walcott, Aruba Hussain, Sarah Ingram, Angela Loulopoulou, Adva Segal, Elena Volkova
The paper presents an LLM-based framework for automatically classifying crisis levels in psychological support hotlines, addressing variability in human judgments and staffing constraints. It introduces a paralinguistic injection method that embeds non‑verbal emotional cues into transcripts, allowing the model to consider acoustic nuances. A reasoning‑enhanced training strategy encourages the model to produce diagnostic reasoning chains, which regularizes and improves classification, achieving a macro F1‑score of 0.802 and accuracy of 0.805 in 5‑fold cross‑validation.
By Terumi Chiba, Yang Luo, Ziyun Cui, Yongsheng Tong, Chao Zhang
arXiv:2608.29326v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Positive psychology dialogue aims to support emotional distress and positive resource building, requiring models to produce not only empathetic repli...
By Yuxiong Wang, Ziwei Lin, Bo Wang, Yu Zhang, Shiguang Ni