Trustworthy AI Psychotherapy: Multi-Agent LLM Workflow for Counseling and Explainable Mental Disorder Diagnosis

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ozgun, Mithat Can, Pei, Jiahuan, Hindriks, Koen, Donatelli, Lucia, Liu, Qingzhi, Wang, Junxiao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ozgun, Mithat Can
Pei, Jiahuan
Hindriks, Koen
Donatelli, Lucia
Liu, Qingzhi
Wang, Junxiao
author_facet Ozgun, Mithat Can
Pei, Jiahuan
Hindriks, Koen
Donatelli, Lucia
Liu, Qingzhi
Wang, Junxiao
contents LLM-based agents have emerged as transformative tools capable of executing complex tasks through iterative planning and action, achieving significant advancements in understanding and addressing user needs. Yet, their effectiveness remains limited in specialized domains such as mental health diagnosis, where they underperform compared to general applications. Current approaches to integrating diagnostic capabilities into LLMs rely on scarce, highly sensitive mental health datasets, which are challenging to acquire. These methods also fail to emulate clinicians' proactive inquiry skills, lack multi-turn conversational comprehension, and struggle to align outputs with expert clinical reasoning. To address these gaps, we propose DSM5AgentFlow, the first LLM-based agent workflow designed to autonomously generate DSM-5 Level-1 diagnostic questionnaires. By simulating therapist-client dialogues with specific client profiles, the framework delivers transparent, step-by-step disorder predictions, producing explainable and trustworthy results. This workflow serves as a complementary tool for mental health diagnosis, ensuring adherence to ethical and legal standards. Through comprehensive experiments, we evaluate leading LLMs across three critical dimensions: conversational realism, diagnostic accuracy, and explainability. Our datasets and implementations are fully open-sourced.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_11398
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Trustworthy AI Psychotherapy: Multi-Agent LLM Workflow for Counseling and Explainable Mental Disorder Diagnosis
Ozgun, Mithat Can
Pei, Jiahuan
Hindriks, Koen
Donatelli, Lucia
Liu, Qingzhi
Wang, Junxiao
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
LLM-based agents have emerged as transformative tools capable of executing complex tasks through iterative planning and action, achieving significant advancements in understanding and addressing user needs. Yet, their effectiveness remains limited in specialized domains such as mental health diagnosis, where they underperform compared to general applications. Current approaches to integrating diagnostic capabilities into LLMs rely on scarce, highly sensitive mental health datasets, which are challenging to acquire. These methods also fail to emulate clinicians' proactive inquiry skills, lack multi-turn conversational comprehension, and struggle to align outputs with expert clinical reasoning. To address these gaps, we propose DSM5AgentFlow, the first LLM-based agent workflow designed to autonomously generate DSM-5 Level-1 diagnostic questionnaires. By simulating therapist-client dialogues with specific client profiles, the framework delivers transparent, step-by-step disorder predictions, producing explainable and trustworthy results. This workflow serves as a complementary tool for mental health diagnosis, ensuring adherence to ethical and legal standards. Through comprehensive experiments, we evaluate leading LLMs across three critical dimensions: conversational realism, diagnostic accuracy, and explainability. Our datasets and implementations are fully open-sourced.
title Trustworthy AI Psychotherapy: Multi-Agent LLM Workflow for Counseling and Explainable Mental Disorder Diagnosis
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11398