PsyCLIENT is a framework that uses large language models to simulate counseling clients by conditioning responses on client profiles, dialogue histories, and conversational trajectories that specify target behaviors and content constraints. The authors created PsyCLIENT-CP, a dataset of 120 Chinese client profiles covering 60 counseling topics, and evaluated the system with 24 professional counselors, finding higher authenticity and training utility ratings compared to baseline methods. In a source-identification study, PsyCLIENT-generated dialogues were more often mistaken for real human-client interactions than those from other models, indicating the effectiveness of conversational trajectory modeling in producing realistic counseling conversations.
By Huachuan Qiu, Zhaoming Chen, Yuqian Chen, Yuan Xie, Yu Lu, Zhenzhong Lan
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.
By Aishik Mandal, Hiba Arnaout, Clarissa W. Ong, Juliet Bockhorst, Kate Sheehan, Rachael Moldow, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Iryna Gurevych
CliniCIRCA is a modular large‑language‑model framework that reconstructs longitudinal mental‑health patient journeys from raw electronic health record narratives. It temporally classifies clinical events in unstructured discharge summaries without explicit timestamps, producing 15,891 tagged events from 52 summaries and correcting 629 errors to create verified gold‑standard timelines. The framework then generates temporally grounded summaries, compressing each source by 1.52×, and scales to produce 1,000 silver‑standard timelines for training, showing that instruction tuning improves event extraction, temporal tagging, and summarization across models.
By Aiwei Ivy Zhang, Nimra Ishfaq, Mohit Chandra, Santiago Alvarez Lesmes, Adam Coscia, Khatiya Chelidze Moon, Xiaohan Ding, Munmun De Choudhury
The paper introduces PsyLLM, a large language model specifically designed for mental health counseling that integrates diagnostic reasoning and multiple therapeutic frameworks. It employs an automated data synthesis pipeline that transforms Reddit mental‑health posts into multi‑turn counseling dialogues, guided by DSM/ICD standards and therapies such as CBT, ACT, and psychodynamic approaches. A new benchmark and evaluation protocol show that PsyLLM outperforms baseline models, with results validated by professional counseling experts.
By He Hu, Juzheng Si, Qianning Wang, Fei Ma, Fuji Ren, Sicheng Zhao, Yucheng Zhou, Laizhong Cui
arXiv:2610.02885v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Mental health disorders affect a substantial proportion of the global population, yet a persistent shortage of trained practitioners leaves the majorit...
By Yuting Yan, Shihao Xu, Junhao Yu, Mingcong Zuo, Lu Chen, Nan Xiang, Haiyang Geng, Dongjie Tao, Minghao Wang
MACBT is a clinician‑facing AI decision‑support system that models the five‑stage CBT workflow with five collaborative agents and incorporates a CBT‑specific longitudinal memory module (CD Memory) to track cognitive distortions across sessions. The system generates pre‑session pathology reports and prioritises interventions, and was trained on a Chinese CBT dialogue corpus using a Qwen3‑14B backbone with supervised fine‑tuning and preference optimisation. Evaluation by GPT‑4 judges shows MACBT outperforms several existing chatbots in professionalism and clinical authenticity, and the memory‑augmented version improves session quality by 12.6% and achieves a longitudinal mean of 2.29 on continuity, progression, and personalization.
By De Jiang, Shuo Zhang, Weiwei Liao, Jianying Zhang, Chuanhui Yu, Hongen Liao, Kehong Yuan
arXiv:2608. 12750v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based simulated clients are increasingly used to train novice counselors, evaluate LLM therapists, and generate synthetic data.
By Sahand Sabour, TszYam NG, Yaqian Chen, Guanqun Bi, Jialu Zhao, Minlie Huang
arXiv:2409.02244v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used as ad hoc therapists. While prior research has found that LLMs outperform human coun...
By Zainab Iftikhar, Sean Ransom, Amy Xiao, Nicole Nugent, Jeff Huang
The paper introduces StratCBT, a new dataset of 9,688 psychological counseling sessions with 256K utterances, each counselor response aligned to one of eight Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) strategies. It was created by modeling clients’ negative thoughts and generating high‑quality conversations through self‑chat, using realistic sessions for guidance. Experiments show that strategy‑aligned generation improves professional and effective counseling when evaluated with large language model‑simulated clients.
By Zimu Wang, Yiwen Jiang, Xiangyu Zhao, Yaling Shen, Jiahe Liu, Stephanie Fong, Maxmartwell H Cheng, Guilherme C Oliveira, Anh Nguyen, Robert Desimone, Barnaby Nelson, Dominic Dwyer, Zongyuan Ge
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...
By Doan Nam Long Vu, Rui Tan, Lena Moench, Svenja Jule Francke, Daniel Woiwod, Florian Thomas-Odenthal, Sanna Stroth, Tilo Kircher, Christiane Hermann, Udo Dannlowski, Hamidreza Jamalabadi, Simone Balloccu, Shaoxiong Ji
arXiv:2509.04183v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: The growing demand for scalable psychological counseling highlights the need for high-quality, privacy-compliant data, yet such data remains...
By Aishik Mandal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Iryna Gurevych
arXiv:2609.17180v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multimodal counselor response generation (MCRG) aims to generate an appropriate counselor response from multimodal dialogue histories. Progress is limi...
By Wenjie Zheng, Qiming Xie, Jianfei Yu, Rui Xia