Paper ID: 2409.19533

Mixed Chain-of-Psychotherapies for Emotional Support Chatbot

Siyuan Chen, Cong Ming, Zhiling Zhang, Yanyi Chen, Kenny Q. Zhu, Mengyue Wu

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.

Submitted: Sep 29, 2024