In this talk, I will argue that Language Models (LMs) could play a significant role in mental health support. Access to mental health care falls short of meeting the significant need. More than one billion individuals are affected by mental health conditions, with the majority not receiving the necessary treatment. In this talk, I will describe how human-AI collaboration, critically enabled by language models, can improve access to and quality of mental health support. Lacking access to professional care or complementing it, millions of people turn to online peer support communities. While potentially highly beneficial and significantly more accessible, peer supporters are rarely trained in providing effective support. To train peer supporters, we developed a human-AI collaboration tool that teaches how to express empathy effectively, leveraging language models and reinforcement learning. A randomized trial with peer supporters from Talklife, the largest peer support platform globally, demonstrates that actionable, just-in-time AI feedback leads to conversations with higher empathy, outperforming traditional training methods. We further demonstrate how a human-AI collaboration approach can teach individuals how to reframe negative thoughts. Enabled by recent advances in language models, this approach makes the evidence-based intervention of cognitive restructuring widely accessible and easier to engage with. Findings from a randomized field study on the Mental Health America platform with over 100,000 participants, demonstrate far superior engagement and completion rates compared to a non-AI-supported intervention and inform psychological theory regarding which types of reframes lead to a range of positive outcomes.
Cognitive Reframing of Negative Thoughts through Human-Language Model Interaction. Sharma, Rushton, Lin, Wadden, Lucas, Miner, Nguyen, Althoff. ACL 2023. Outstanding Paper Award.
Human-AI Collaboration Enables More Empathic Conversations in Text-based Peer-to-Peer Mental Health Support. Sharma, Lin, Miner, Atkins, Althoff. Nature Machine Intelligence, 2023.
Towards Facilitating Empathic Conversations in Online Mental Health Support: A Reinforcement Learning Approach. Sharma, Lin, Miner, Atkins, Althoff. WebConf 2021. Best Paper Award.
A Computational Approach to Understanding Empathy Expressed in Text-Based Mental Health Support. Sharma, Miner, Atkins, Althoff. EMNLP 2020.