arXiv AI By Manisha Mehta, Virendra Mehta

When Vocabulary Comprehension Fails Clinical Reasoning: Evaluating Therapy Bots' Safety Risks for Generation Alpha

Read the original on arXiv AI →

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.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

From Pattern Recognizers to Personalized Companions: A Survey of Large Language Models in Mental Health

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.

By He Hu, Yucheng Zhou, Qianning Wang, Yingjian Zou, Chiyuan Ma, Juzheng Si, Jianzhuang Liu, Zitong Yu, Laizhong Cui, Fei Ma, Qi Tian
arXiv AI
Aug 28

A Safety-Gated Multimodal AI Backend for Mental-Health Support: Hierarchical State Representation, Conservative Risk Fusion, and Controlled Generation in Anian

Anian is a safety‑gated multimodal AI backend designed for perinatal mental‑health support and mindfulness‑intervention routing. It maps user input into a four‑layer hierarchical state representation—emotion, psychosocial constructs, safety risk, and intervention routes—then fuses local and external risk signals to decide whether to generate AI responses or provide fixed safety content. Prototype evaluation on large public corpora showed high classification performance and perfect high‑risk recall in a controlled stress test, though clinical validity remains unestablished.

By Lei Wang, Xiao Wang, Lei Li
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 Computation and Language
3d ago

MindEval2: Clinically Grounded Patients and Rubrics for Evaluating Language Models in Mental Health Support

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.

By John Mendon\c{c}a, Daniel Tschernutter, Jos\'e Pombal, Areti Vassilopoulos, Catarina Botelho, Ignacio Sarasua, Maya D'Eon, Nuno Guerreiro, Ricardo Rei