OpenAI Blog

Introducing MentalHealthBench

Introducing MentalHealthBench, a new benchmark developed by OpenAI, is designed to evaluate AI responses in realistic mental health conversations. The benchmark is expert-informed, focusing on assessing both helpfulness and safety of the AI’s replies. It aims to provide a standardized way to measure performance in sensitive mental health contexts.

OpenAI Blog
May 12, 2025

Introducing HealthBench

HealthBench is a new evaluation benchmark for AI in healthcare which evaluates models in realistic scenarios. Built with input from 250+ physicians, it aims to provide a shared standard for model performance and safety in health.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

CounselReflect: Opportunities and Challenges for Designing Tools to Support Self-Reflection on Mental Health and Well-Being Conversations with AI

The paper introduces CounselReflect, a tool that converts counseling quality metrics into a framework for users to reflect on their mental‑health AI conversations. Through interviews with 21 users, the study finds that while most participants rarely reflect on their interactions, they identify specific questions they would like such a tool to address. The findings also reveal that users tend to confirm existing beliefs and focus on familiar dimensions, highlighting the need for reflection tools to expose blind spots and encourage a more comprehensive examination of AI interactions, especially when revisiting emotionally charged exchanges.

By Yahan Li, Chaohao Du, Christopher Chun Kuizon, Zeyang Li, Nimra Ishfaq, Shupeng Cheng, Angelica Yinling Sun, Adam C. Frank, Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang, Ruishan Liu
arXiv AI
Jul 29

PatientAgentBench: A Benchmark Framework for Evaluating Patient-Facing Health AI Agents

arXiv:2607. 25485v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Health AI is evolving from answering questions to agentic systems that converse with patients, reason about health records, and act on their behalf.

By Korosh Vatanparvar, Ashutosh Joshi, Maria Xenochristou, Mohammad Abuzar Hashemi, Prasad Kasu, Deepak Bansal, Daniel Lopez-Martinez, Anchal Nema, Ramya Ganesan, Will Kimbrough, Alex Woody, Yadunandana Rao, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Wilko Schulz-Mahlendorf
arXiv AI
Jul 28

OpenAIs HealthBench in Action: Evaluating an LLM-Based Medical Assistant on Realistic Clinical Queries

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.

By Sandhanakrishnan Ravichandran, Shivesh Kumar, Rogerio Corga Da Silva, Miguel Romano, Reinhard Berkels, Michiel van der Heijden, Olivier Fail, Valentine Emmanuel Gnanapragasam
arXiv AI
Sep 15

K-Bench: a clinically calibrated benchmark for evaluating large language models in high-risk mental health conversations

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
arXiv AI
Sep 21

Clinician-Grounded Quality Assurance for AI-Assisted Psychiatric Intake

The paper introduces a clinician‑grounded evaluation platform called InterviewPlayground, which uses a memory‑augmented patient simulator to assess AI‑assisted psychiatric intake systems. It supports comparison across different interviewing styles, reduces clinician workload, and measures clinically relevant performance. In a pilot study, a GPT‑based intake interviewer captured more relevant items but made more unfounded inferences and missed safety concerns compared to clinicians.

By King Shi, Amanda Li, Jonathan Ivey, Synthia Qia Wang, Guan Gui, Hyunseo Kim, Peter Zandi, Jason Straub, Jacob Taylor, Ananya Joshi
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 24

Trust Stack for Mental Health AI: A Survey of Calibration across Human, Interaction, and AI Layers

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