  Great research interests have been attracted to devise AI services that are
able to provide mental health support. However, the lack of corpora is a main
obstacle to this research, particularly in Chinese language. In this paper, we
propose PsyQA, a Chinese dataset of psychological health support in the form of
question and answer pair. PsyQA is crawled from a Chinese mental health service
platform, and contains 22K questions and 56K long and well-structured answers.
Based on the psychological counseling theories, we annotate a portion of answer
texts with typical strategies for providing support, and further present
in-depth analysis of both lexical features and strategy patterns in the
counseling answers. We also evaluate the performance of generating counseling
answers with the generative pretrained models. Results show that utilizing
strategies enhances the fluency and helpfulness of generated answers, but there
is still a large space for future research.
