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.

Controlling chatbot utterance generation with multiple attributes such as personalities, emotions and dialogue acts is a practically useful but under-studied problem. We propose a novel framework called DASC that possesses strong controllability with a weighted decoding paradigm, while improving generation quality with the grounding in an attribute semantics space. Generation with multiple attributes is then intuitively implemented with an interpolation of multiple attribute embeddings, which results in substantial reduction in the model sizes. Experiments show that DASC can achieve high control accuracy in generation task with the simultaneous control of 3 aspects while also producing interesting and reasonably sensible responses, even in an out-of-distribution robustness test.

Empowering chatbots in the field of mental health is receiving increasing amount of attention, while there still lacks exploration in developing and evaluating chatbots in psychiatric outpatient scenarios. In this work, we focus on exploring the potential of ChatGPT in powering chatbots for psychiatrist and patient simulation. We collaborate with psychiatrists to identify objectives and iteratively develop the dialogue system to closely align with real-world scenarios. In the evaluation experiments, we recruit real psychiatrists and patients to engage in diagnostic conversations with the chatbots, collecting their ratings for assessment. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of using ChatGPT-powered chatbots in psychiatric scenarios and explore the impact of prompt designs on chatbot behavior and user experience.