# CounselReflect: Opportunities and Challenges for Designing Tools to Support Self-Reflection on Mental Health and Well-Being Conversations with AI

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29429 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29429/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 389 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15594/) (2024)
- [FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14251/) (2023)
- [DailyDialog: A Manually Labelled Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03957/) (2017)
- [From Crowdsourced Data to High-Quality Benchmarks: Arena-Hard and BenchBuilder Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11939/) (2024)
- [TweetEval: Unified Benchmark and Comparative Evaluation for Tweet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12421/) (2020)
- [Nuanced Metrics for Measuring Unintended Bias with Real Data for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04561/) (2019)
- [Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01144/) (2021)
- [A New Generation of Perspective API: Efficient Multilingual Character-level Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11176/) (2022)
- [A Computational Approach to Understanding Empathy Expressed in Text-Based Mental Health Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08441/) (2020)
- [Expressing stigma and inappropriate responses prevents LLMs from safely replacing mental health providers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18412/) (2025)
- [Mental-LLM: Leveraging Large Language Models for Mental Health Prediction via Online Text Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14385/) (2023)
- [The Dark Side of AI Companionship: A Taxonomy of Harmful Algorithmic Behaviors in Human-AI Relationships](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20130/) (2024)
- [MindfulDiary: Harnessing Large Language Model to Support Psychiatric Patients' Journaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05231/) (2023)
- [Customizing Emotional Support: How Do Individuals Construct and Interact With LLM-Powered Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12943/) (2025)
- [MindScape Study: Integrating LLM and Behavioral Sensing for Personalized AI-Driven Journaling Experiences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09570/) (2024)
- [Helping the Helper: Supporting Peer Counselors via AI-Empowered Practice and Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08982/) (2023)
- [CounselBench: A Large-Scale Expert Evaluation and Adversarial Benchmarking of Large Language Models in Mental Health Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08584/) (2025)
- [Multi-Level Feedback Generation with Large Language Models for Empowering Novice Peer Counselors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15482/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Efficacy of Large Language Models in Summarizing Mental Health Counseling Sessions: A Benchmark Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19052/) (2024)
- [Can LLM-Simulated Practice and Feedback Upskill Human Counselors? A Randomized Study with 90+ Novice Counselors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02428/) (2025)
- [Understanding Teen Overreliance on AI Companion Chatbots Through Self-Reported Reddit Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15783/) (2025)
- [CRADLE Bench: A Clinician-Annotated Benchmark for Multi-Faceted Mental Health Crisis and Safety Risk Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23845/) (2025)
- [Momentary Stressor Logging and Reflective Visualizations: Implications for Stress Management with Wearables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16307/) (2024)
- [Towards a Human-in-the-Loop Framework for Reliable Patch Evaluation Using an LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10865/) (2025)
- [A Framework for Evaluating Appropriateness, Trustworthiness, and Safety in Mental Wellness AI Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11387/) (2024)
- [iRULER: Intelligible Rubric-Based User-Defined LLM Evaluation for Revision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12779/) (2026)
- [Framing Responsible Design of AI for Mental Well-Being: AI as Primary Care, Nutritional Supplement, or Yoga Instructor?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02740/) (2026)
- [Chaplains' Reflections on the Design and Usage of AI for Conversational Care](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04017/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

AI is increasingly used for mental health and well-being support, creating an urgent need for safer engagement, while design, evaluation, and governance take time to develop. We explore a complementary approach: helping users critically reflect on their own AI conversations. We introduce CounselReflect, a tool that translates literature-grounded counseling quality metrics into a user-facing reflection framework. Using CounselReflect as a study probe, we interviewed 21 users of AI for mental health and well-being support. Although most participants did not routinely reflect on their conversations, they articulated concrete questions they would want reflection to address. Tool-assisted reflection also revealed challenges: participants selectively sought evidence confirming existing perceptions of AI and prioritized dimensions they already valued. We argue that reflection tools should surface blind spots and scaffold more holistic examination of AI interactions. Finally, overcoming emotional barriers to revisiting tense conversations remains a major design challenge and warrants input from future work.