Mixed Chain-of-Psychotherapies for Emotional Support Chatbot

TL;DR

PsyMix is a novel chatbot that integrates multiple psychotherapy approaches to better understand and respond empathetically to mental health seekers, outperforming baseline models and matching human counselor empathy levels.

Contribution

The paper introduces PsyMix, a mixed chain-of-psychotherapies approach that enhances emotional support chatbots by analyzing and incorporating diverse psychotherapy strategies.

Findings

PsyMix outperforms ChatGPT baseline in empathy and understanding.

PsyMix demonstrates comparable empathy levels to human counselors.

The approach effectively integrates multiple psychotherapy perspectives.

Abstract

In the realm of mental health support chatbots, it is vital to show empathy and encourage self-exploration to provide tailored solutions. However, current approaches tend to provide general insights or solutions without fully understanding the help-seeker's situation. Therefore, we propose PsyMix, a chatbot that integrates the analyses of the seeker's state from the perspective of a psychotherapy approach (Chain-of-Psychotherapies, CoP) before generating the response, and learns to incorporate the strength of various psychotherapies by fine-tuning on a mixture of CoPs. Through comprehensive evaluation, we found that PsyMix can outperform the ChatGPT baseline, and demonstrate a comparable level of empathy in its responses to that of human counselors.