  This paper presents ChatCounselor, a large language model (LLM) solution
designed to provide mental health support. Unlike generic chatbots,
ChatCounselor is distinguished by its foundation in real conversations between
consulting clients and professional psychologists, enabling it to possess
specialized knowledge and counseling skills in the field of psychology. The
training dataset, Psych8k, was constructed from 260 in-depth interviews, each
spanning an hour. To assess the quality of counseling responses, the counseling
Bench was devised. Leveraging GPT-4 and meticulously crafted prompts based on
seven metrics of psychological counseling assessment, the model underwent
evaluation using a set of real-world counseling questions. Impressively,
ChatCounselor surpasses existing open-source models in the counseling Bench and
approaches the performance level of ChatGPT, showcasing the remarkable
enhancement in model capability attained through high-quality domain-specific
data.
