Counseling Responses for Mental Health Forum Questions with Early Maladaptive Schema Prediction

Sujatha Das Gollapalli, Beng Heng Ang, Mingzhe Du, See-Kiong Ng

Abstract: State-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities for general Question Answering (QA) tasks. However, their practical use for answering mental health questions has been limited due to the missing link between LLM-generated answer responses and well-established theories and guiding principles from Psychology and Counseling. We present a first step in this direction with STeer, an AI-based method that supports Schema Therapy-enabled responses for mental health questions on community QA forums. STeer uses Early Maladaptive Schemas (EMSs), a fundamental concept from Schema Therapy that characterizes “self-defeating, unhealthy patterns of thought and behavior” in individuals, to effectively prompt state-of-the-art LLMs to generate specific, theoretically-grounded, empathetic counseling responses to mental health questions. We present EMSRank, a novel method based on the Personalized PageRank algorithm, to automatically predict the EMSs from mental health forum question texts. We show that EMSRank is computationally scalable and can be further combined with textual entailment to obtain high precision, explainable EMS labels for mental health forum questions. To address the current lack of annotated datasets, we also leveraged on EMSRank to create a first-of-its-kind, large dataset of about 23K EMS-annotated mental health questions from three diverse, currently operating, peer-support community forums for mental health. With the global rise in mental health issues, our work is a timely step towards enabling the use of AI-based assistive tools for counseling support on mental health community forums.