PsyChat: A Client-Centric Dialogue System for Mental Health Support

TL;DR

PsyChat is a client-centric dialogue system designed for mental health support that recognizes client behaviors, selects appropriate counselor strategies, and generates suitable responses, improving the effectiveness of online mental health interventions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel client-centric framework with five modules, focusing on client behaviors rather than counselor strategies, enhancing realism and appropriateness in mental health dialogue systems.

Findings

Demonstrated effectiveness through automatic and human evaluations.

Successfully predicted client behaviors and generated appropriate responses.

Proved practicality in real-life mental health support scenarios.

Abstract

Dialogue systems are increasingly integrated into mental health support to help clients facilitate exploration, gain insight, take action, and ultimately heal themselves. A practical and user-friendly dialogue system should be client-centric, focusing on the client's behaviors. However, existing dialogue systems publicly available for mental health support often concentrate solely on the counselor's strategies rather than the behaviors expressed by clients. This can lead to unreasonable or inappropriate counseling strategies and corresponding responses generated by the dialogue system. To address this issue, we propose PsyChat, a client-centric dialogue system that provides psychological support through online chat. The client-centric dialogue system comprises five modules: client behavior recognition, counselor strategy selection, input packer, response generator, and response selection. Both automatic and human evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of our proposed dialogue system for real-life mental health support. Furthermore, the case study demonstrates that the dialogue system can predict the client's behaviors, select appropriate counselor strategies, and generate accurate and suitable responses.