Reframe Your Life Story: Interactive Narrative Therapist and Innovative Moment Assessment with Large Language Models

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel framework combining an interactive narrative therapist and an innovative moment assessment to enhance mental health support through large language models, capturing therapeutic progress and improving response quality.

Contribution

It presents a new system integrating therapy simulation and progress measurement using LLMs, addressing realism and effectiveness in digital narrative therapy.

Findings

INT outperforms standard LLMs in therapeutic quality

Effective in tracking therapy progress through Innovative Moments

Synthesizes high-quality support conversations for social use

Abstract

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has opened new possibilities for mental health support, yet current approaches lack realism in simulating specialized psychotherapy and fail to capture therapeutic progression over time. Narrative therapy, which helps individuals transform problematic life stories into empowering alternatives, remains underutilized due to limited access and social stigma. We address these limitations through a comprehensive framework with two core components. First, INT (Interactive Narrative Therapist) simulates expert narrative therapists by planning therapeutic stages, guiding reflection levels, and generating contextually appropriate expert-like responses. Second, IMA (Innovative Moment Assessment) provides a therapy-centric evaluation method that quantifies effectiveness by tracking "Innovative Moments" (IMs), critical narrative shifts in client speech signaling therapy progress. Experimental results on 260 simulated clients and 230 human participants reveal that INT consistently outperforms standard LLMs in therapeutic quality and depth. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of INT in synthesizing high-quality support conversations to facilitate social applications.