mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Empowering Psychotherapy with Large Language Models: Cognitive Distortion Detection through Diagnosis of Thought Prompting

arXiv 2310.07146 ↗First posted 11 Oct 2023cs.CLcited by 31

On the map: LLM reasoning → Clinical and biomedical applications

Abstract (arXiv)

Mental illness remains one of the most critical public health issues of our time, due to the severe scarcity and accessibility limit of professionals. Psychotherapy requires high-level expertise to conduct deep, complex reasoning and analysis on the cognition modeling of the patients. In the era of Large Language Models, we believe it is the right time to develop AI assistance for computational psychotherapy. We study the task of cognitive distortion detection and propose the Diagnosis of Thought (DoT) prompting. DoT performs diagnosis on the patient's speech via three stages: subjectivity assessment to separate the facts and the thoughts; contrastive reasoning to elicit the reasoning processes supporting and contradicting the thoughts; and schema analysis to summarize the cognition schemas. The generated diagnosis rationales through the three stages are essential for assisting the professionals. Experiments demonstrate that DoT obtains significant improvements over ChatGPT for cognitive distortion detection, while generating high-quality rationales approved by human experts.

Key facts. Cited by 31 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Clinical and biomedical applications, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 14 of its 37 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2023.

Builds on

14 of 37 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2023Training Models to Generate, Recognize, and Reframe Unhelpful Thoughts6 Jul

Other references · 13

  1. 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,396
  2. 2022Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasonerscited by 4,374
  3. 2023Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4cited by 2,592
  4. 2023A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivitycited by 894
  5. 2020A Computational Approach to Understanding Empathy Expressed in Text-Based Mental Health Supportcited by 182
  6. 2023Clever Hans or Neural Theory of Mind? Stress Testing Social Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 163
  7. 2021MentalBERT: Publicly Available Pretrained Language Models for Mental Healthcarecited by 161
  8. 2022Large Language Models are few(1)-shot Table Reasonerscited by 116
  9. 2018SMHD: A Large-Scale Resource for Exploring Online Language Usage for Multiple Mental Health Conditionscited by 73
  10. 2019Observing Dialogue in Therapy: Categorizing and Forecasting Behavioral Codescited by 25
  11. 2023Helping the Helper: Supporting Peer Counselors via AI-Empowered Practice and Feedbackcited by 23
  12. 2018RSDD-Time: Temporal Annotation of Self-Reported Mental Health Diagnosescited by 9
1 more
  1. 2022EmoMent: An Emotion Annotated Mental Health Corpus from two South Asian Countriescited by 7

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 14; 2025: 13; 2026: 4.

31 papers.

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  1. 2024HealMe: Harnessing Cognitive Reframing in Large Language Models for Psychotherapycited by 47
  2. 2024Large Language Models in Mental Health Care: a Scoping Reviewcited by 34
  3. 2024PsychoGAT: A Novel Psychological Measurement Paradigm through Interactive Fiction Games with LLM Agentscited by 28
  4. 2024Data-Centric Foundation Models in Computational Healthcare: A Surveycited by 27
  5. 2024PATIENT-Psi: Using Large Language Models to Simulate Patients for Training Mental Health Professionalscited by 21
  6. 2024Chain-of-Interaction: Enhancing Large Language Models for Psychiatric Behavior Understanding by Dyadic Contextscited by 19
  7. 2024Detecting Conversational Mental Manipulation with Intent-Aware Promptingcited by 16
  8. 2025MAGI: Multi-Agent Guided Interview for Psychiatric Assessmentcited by 14
  9. 2024CBT-Bench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Assisting Cognitive Behavior Therapycited by 12
  10. 2025A Survey of Large Language Models in Psychotherapy: Current Landscape and Future Directionscited by 12
  11. 2024Large Language Models in Biomedical and Health Informatics: A Review with Bibliometric Analysiscited by 10
  12. 2025Preference Learning Unlocks LLMs' Psycho-Counseling Skillscited by 10
19 more
  1. 2024Socratic Reasoning Improves Positive Text Rewritingcited by 9
  2. 2024Can LLMs Correct Physicians, Yet? Investigating Effective Interaction Methods in the Medical Domaincited by 7
  3. 2025The Pursuit of Empathy: Evaluating Small Language Models for PTSD Dialogue Supportcited by 6
  4. 2025KoACD: The First Korean Adolescent Dataset for Cognitive Distortion Analysis via Role-Switching Multi-LLM Negotiationcited by 4
  5. 2025Exploratory Study into Relations between Cognitive Distortions and Emotional Appraisalscited by 3
  6. 2025A Survey of Cognitive Distortion Detection and Classification in NLPcited by 3
  7. 2024Enhancing Depression-Diagnosis-Oriented Chat with Psychological State Trackingcited by 2
  8. 2024A Generic Review of Integrating Artificial Intelligence in Cognitive Behavioral Therapycited by 2
  9. 2025Does "Reasoning" with Large Language Models Improve Recognizing, Generating, and Reframing Unhelpful Thoughts?cited by 2
  10. 2026Responsible Evaluation of AI for Mental Healthcited by 2
  11. 2025Multi-View Attention Multiple-Instance Learning Enhanced by LLM Reasoning for Cognitive Distortion Detectioncited by 1
  12. 2025Towards Consistent Detection of Cognitive Distortions: LLM-Based Annotation and Dataset-Agnostic Evaluationcited by 1
  13. 2024IoT-Based Preventive Mental Health Using Knowledge Graphs and Standards for Better Well-Beingcited by 0
  14. 2025CALLM: Understanding Cancer Survivors' Emotions and Intervention Opportunities via Mobile Diaries and Context-Aware Language Modelscited by 0
  15. 2025When LLM Therapists Become Salespeople: Evaluating Large Language Models for Ethical Motivational Interviewingcited by 0
  16. 2025Signs of Struggle: Spotting Cognitive Distortions across Language and Registercited by 0
  17. 2026Assessing the Effectiveness of LLMs in Delivering Cognitive Behavioral Therapycited by 0
  18. 2026Exploring Profiles of Cognitive Distortions Associated with Mental Health Disorderscited by 0
  19. 2026Multi-Perspective Triad Interaction Graph Neural Network for Cognitive Distortion Detectioncited by 0

Similar, not cited

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  1. 2025WiseMind: a knowledge-guided multi-agent framework for accurate and empathetic psychiatric diagnosis
  2. 2025MindEval: Benchmarking Language Models on Multi-turn Mental Health Support
  3. 2026Mind Companion: An Embodied Conversational Agent for Process-Based Psychotherapy
  4. 2024ERD: A Framework for Improving LLM Reasoning for Cognitive Distortion Classification
  5. 2026Assessing Risks of Large Language Models in Mental Health Support: A Framework for Automated Clinical AI Red Teaming
  6. 2025Does Rationale Quality Matter? Enhancing Mental Disorder Detection via Selective Reasoning Distillation
  7. 2023Rethinking Large Language Models in Mental Health Applications
  8. 2024An Active Inference Strategy for Prompting Reliable Responses from Large Language Models in Medical Practice