ChatCounselor: A Large Language Models for Mental Health Support

TL;DR

ChatCounselor is a large language model trained on real psychologist-client conversations, demonstrating superior mental health support capabilities and approaching ChatGPT's performance, highlighting the importance of domain-specific data.

Contribution

The paper introduces ChatCounselor, a novel LLM trained on specialized psychological counseling data, improving mental health support performance over existing open-source models.

Findings

Outperforms existing open-source counseling models.

Approaches ChatGPT's performance in counseling assessments.

Utilizes a new dataset, Psych8k, from real therapy interviews.

Abstract

This paper presents ChatCounselor, a large language model (LLM) solution designed to provide mental health support. Unlike generic chatbots, ChatCounselor is distinguished by its foundation in real conversations between consulting clients and professional psychologists, enabling it to possess specialized knowledge and counseling skills in the field of psychology. The training dataset, Psych8k, was constructed from 260 in-depth interviews, each spanning an hour. To assess the quality of counseling responses, the counseling Bench was devised. Leveraging GPT-4 and meticulously crafted prompts based on seven metrics of psychological counseling assessment, the model underwent evaluation using a set of real-world counseling questions. Impressively, ChatCounselor surpasses existing open-source models in the counseling Bench and approaches the performance level of ChatGPT, showcasing the remarkable enhancement in model capability attained through high-quality domain-specific data.