Towards Motivational and Empathetic Response Generation in Online Mental Health Support

The scarcity of Mental Health Professionals (MHPs) available to assist patients underlines the need for developing automated systems to help MHPs combat the grievous mental illness called Major Depressive Disorder. In this paper, we develop a Virtual Assistant (VA) that serves as a first point of contact for users who are depressed or disheartened. In support based conversations, two primary components have been identified to produce positive outcomes,empathy andmotivation. While empathy necessitates acknowledging the feelings of the users with a desire to help, imparting hope and motivation uplifts the spirit of support seekers in distress. A combination of these aspects will ensure generalized positive outcome and beneficial alliance in mental health support. The VA, thus, should be capable of generating empathetic and motivational responses, continuously demonstrating positive sentiment by the VA. The end-to-end system employs two mechanisms in a pipe-lined manner : (i)Motivational Response Generator (MRG) : a sentiment driven Reinforcement Learning (RL) based motivational response generator; and (ii)Empathetic Rewriting Framework (ERF) : a transformer based model that rewrites the response from MRG to induce empathy. Experimental results indicate that our proposed VA outperforms several of its counterparts. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that seeks to incorporate these aspects together in an end-to-end system.