Exploring the application boundaries of LLMs in mental health: a systematic scoping review

LLMs have emerged as sophisticated "Mental Health Agents" with immense potential for providing personalized, knowledge-guided interventions. The core challenge for future development is to transcend basic functionality and achieve clinical rigor. Future research must prioritize deep specialization into psychological models, enhance multimodal integration for comprehensive patient assessment, and urgently develop robust ethical and cultural adaptation frameworks to ensure the models are safe, globally equitable, and reliable for clinical deployment, thereby fulfilling their potential to alleviate the global mental health resource crisis.