Survey maps LLM mental health evolution: pattern recognizer to companion

He Hu · hf · 2026-09-23

A new survey organizes the fragmented literature on LLMs in mental health around a three-phase trajectory: Phase I passive information tools and pattern recognizers for assessment, Phase II empathetic stateless conversationalists, and the current Phase III frontier of stateful cognitive agents acting as longitudinal personalized companions. It reviews core techniques, agent architectures (profile, memory, reasoning, planning), and dataset/benchmark infrastructure, motivated by rising mental health prevalence and healthcare barriers like cost, stigma, and privacy. A curated resource repo accompanies the paper.

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