Automatic Evaluation for Mental Health Counseling using LLMs

High-quality psychological counseling is crucial for mental health worldwide, and timely evaluation is vital for ensuring its effectiveness. However, obtaining professional evaluation for each counseling session is expensive and challenging. Existing methods that rely on self or third-party manual reports to assess the quality of counseling suffer from subjective biases and limitations of time-consuming. To address above challenges, this paper proposes an innovative and efficient automatic approach using large language models (LLMs) to evaluate the working alliance in counseling conversations. We collected a comprehensive counseling dataset and conducted multiple third-party evaluations based on therapeutic relationship theory. Our LLM-based evaluation, combined with our guidelines, shows high agreement with human evaluations and provides valuable insights into counseling scripts. This highlights the potential of LLMs as supervisory tools for psychotherapists. By integrating LLMs into the evaluation process, our approach offers a cost-effective and dependable means of assessing counseling quality, enhancing overall effectiveness.