Cloning the Self for Mental Well-Being: A Framework for Designing Safe and Therapeutic Self-Clone Chatbots

TL;DR

This paper proposes a comprehensive design framework for safe and therapeutic self-clone chatbots in mental health, emphasizing grounding in therapy models, relationship dynamics, and harm minimization.

Contribution

It introduces an interdisciplinary framework guiding responsible self-clone chatbot design for mental health support, addressing ethical and emotional considerations.

Findings

Identified key design priorities for self-clone chatbots.

Developed a framework grounded in therapeutic models.

Highlighted risks and mitigation strategies for emotional harms.

Abstract

As digital tools increasingly mediate mental health care, self-clone chatbots can offer a uniquely novel approach to intra-personal exploration and self-derived support. Trained to replicate users' conversational patterns, self-clones allow users to talk to themselves through their digital replicas. Despite the promises, these systems may carry risks around identity confusion, negative reinforcement, and blurred user agency. Through interviews with 16 mental health professionals and 6 general users, we aim to uncover tensions and design opportunities in this emerging space to guide responsible self-clone design. Our analysis produces a design framework organized around three priorities: (1) defining goals and grounding the approach in existing therapeutic models, (2) design dimensions including the self-clone persona and user-clone relationship dynamics, and (3) considerations for minimizing potential emotional and ethical harms. This framework contributes an interdisciplinary foundation for designing self-clone chatbots as AI-mediated self-interaction tools that are emotionally and ethically attuned in mental health contexts.