# Optimizing Psychological Counseling with Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.13617 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13617/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Overview of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06435/) (2023)
- [Scaling Laws for Autoregressive Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14701/) (2020)
- [Visual In-Context Learning for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11574/) (2024)
- [Eight Things to Know about Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00612/) (2023)
- [ClarET: Pre-training a Correlation-Aware Context-To-Event Transformer for Event-Centric Generation and Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02225/) (2022)
- [ChatCounselor: A Large Language Models for Mental Health Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15461/) (2023)
- [EventBERT: A Pre-Trained Model for Event Correlation Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06533/) (2021)
- [Towards Robust Ranker for Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08063/) (2022)
- [Psy-LLM: Scaling up Global Mental Health Psychological Services with AI-based Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11991/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models in Mental Health Care: a Scoping Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02984/) (2024)
- [Fine-Grained Distillation for Long Document Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10423/) (2022)
- [MemoryMamba: Memory-Augmented State Space Model for Defect Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03673/) (2024)
- [InsectMamba: Insect Pest Classification with State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03611/) (2024)
- [Can Large Language Models be Used to Provide Psychological Counselling? An Analysis of GPT-4-Generated Responses Using Role-play Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12738/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Position: Beyond Assistance -- Reimagining LLMs as Ethical and Adaptive Co-Creators in Mental Health Care](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16456/) (2025)
- [Being Kind Isn't Always Being Safe: Diagnosing Affective Hallucination in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16921/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has significantly advanced various fields, including natural language processing and automated dialogue systems. This paper explores the application of LLMs in psychological counseling, addressing the increasing demand for mental health services. We present a method for instruction tuning LLMs with specialized prompts to enhance their performance in providing empathetic, relevant, and supportive responses. Our approach involves developing a comprehensive dataset of counseling-specific prompts, refining them through feedback from professional counselors, and conducting rigorous evaluations using both automatic metrics and human assessments. The results demonstrate that our instruction-tuned model outperforms several baseline LLMs, highlighting its potential as a scalable and accessible tool for mental health support.