MENTALER: Toward Professional Mental Health Support with LLMs via Multi-Role Collaboration

As mental health issues such as anxiety and depression are increasingly prevalent nowadays, we introduce MENTALER, an advanced multi-role collaboration framework specifically designed to enhance large language models (LLMs) in the diagnosis and treatment of mental health issues. In the MENTALER framework, the mental health support process comprises three specialized roles: Analyzer, Knowledge-Collector, and Strategy-Planner. Analyzer guides LLMs to achieve a in-depth diagnosis via multi-stage chain-of-thought prompting. Knowledge-Collector focus on involving domain-specific knowledge from exemplars retrieval. Strategy-Planner integrates professional support strategies into the generation process to further improve the professionalism among the generated texts. Through extensive automatic and human evaluations, we have validated that the mental health support counseling texts generated by MENTALER demonstrate a high degree of fluency and professionalism, closely aligning with real professional counseling texts. Our research advances the application of LLMs in the field of mental health support, providing an innovative and effective tool for those with psychological problems.