SouLLMate: An Adaptive LLM-Driven System for Advanced Mental Health Support and Assessment, Based on a Systematic Application Survey

TL;DR

SouLLMate is an innovative AI-driven system that offers personalized, real-time mental health support, including suicide risk detection and proactive guidance, by integrating advanced language models, retrieval techniques, and domain expertise.

Contribution

It introduces SouLLMate, a novel adaptive LLM-based system with new evaluation methods and strategies for improved mental health assessment and support.

Findings

Effective suicide risk detection using annotated interview data

Enhanced model performance through KIS and PQS methods

Potential for improved global mental health accessibility

Abstract

Mental health issues significantly impact individuals' daily lives, yet many do not receive the help they need even with available online resources. This study aims to provide accessible, stigma-free, personalized, and real-time mental health support through cutting-edge AI technologies. It makes the following contributions: (1) Conducting an extensive survey of recent mental health support methods to identify prevalent functionalities and unmet needs. (2) Introducing SouLLMate, an adaptive LLM-driven system that integrates LLM technologies, Chain, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), prompt engineering, and domain knowledge. This system offers advanced features such as Suicide Risk Detection and Proactive Guidance Dialogue, and utilizes RAG for personalized profile uploads and Conversational Information Extraction. (3) Developing novel evaluation approaches to assess preliminary assessments and suicide risk detection, utilizing annotated real-life interview data and professionally labeled datasets indicating suicide tendencies. (4) Proposing Key Indicator Summarization (KIS) and Proactive Questioning Strategy (PQS) methods to enhance model performance and usability through context-sensitive response adjustments and semantic coherence evaluations. This study contributes to advancing mental health support technologies, potentially improving the accessibility and effectiveness of mental health care globally.