Rising demand for mental health support has increased interest in using Large Language Models (LLMs) for counseling, but adapting them to this safety-critical domain is hindered by limited real-world data due to privacy constraints. Synthetic datasets provide a promising alternative, but existing approaches often rely on unstructured or semi-structured text inputs and overlook structural dependencies between a client’s cognitive, emotional, and behavioral states, leading to psychologically inconsistent and less realistic interactions. We introduce Graph2Counsel, a framework for generating synthetic counseling sessions grounded in Client Psychological Graphs (CPGs) that encode relationships among clients’ thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Graph2Counsel uses a structured prompting pipeline guided by counselor strategies and CPG, and explores prompting strategies including CoT and Multi-Agent Feedback. It produces 760 sessions from 76 CPGs across diverse client profiles. In expert evaluation, our dataset outperforms prior datasets on specificity, counselor competence, authenticity, conversational flow, and safety (Krippendorff’s 𝛼 = 0.70). Fine-tuning an open-source model on this dataset improves performance on several metrics on CounselingBench and CounselBench, while matching baselines on others. We further introduce Therapy-Eval, a multi-turn evaluation framework, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our fine-tuned model in realistic therapeutic conversations. We make our code, data and fine-tuned model public.

Large language models (LLMs) show promise in offering emotional support and generating empathetic responses for individuals in distress, but their ability to deliver culturally sensitive support remains underexplored due to a lack of resources. In this work, we introduce , the first dataset designed for this task, spanning four cultures and including 1,729 distress messages, 1,523 cultural signals, and 1,041 support strategies with fine-grained emotional and cultural annotations. Leveraging , we (i) develop and test four adaptation strategies for guiding three state-of-the-art LLMs toward culturally sensitive responses; (ii) conduct comprehensive evaluations using LLM-as-a-Judge, in-culture human annotators, and clinical psychologists; (iii) show that adapted LLMs outperform anonymous online peer responses, and that simple cultural role-play is insufficient for cultural sensitivity; and (iv) explore the application of LLMs in clinical training, where experts highlight their potential in fostering cultural competence in novice therapists.

Although artificial intelligence (AI) shows growing promise for mental health care, current approaches to evaluating AI tools in this domain remain fragmented and poorly aligned with clinical practice, social context, and first-hand user experience. This paper argues for a rethinking of responsible evaluation – what is measured, by whom, and for what purpose – by introducing an interdisciplinary framework that integrates clinical soundness, social context, and equity, providing a structured basis for evaluation. Through an analysis of 135 recent *CL publications, we identify recurring limitations, including over-reliance on generic metrics that do not capture clinical validity, therapeutic appropriateness, or user experience, limited participation from mental health professionals, and insufficient attention to safety and equity. To address these gaps, we propose a taxonomy of AI mental health support types – assessment-, intervention-, and information synthesis-oriented – each with distinct risks and evaluative requirements, and illustrate its use through case studies.

Understanding the impact of scientific publications is crucial for identifying breakthroughs and guiding future research. Traditional metrics based on citation counts often miss the nuanced ways a paper contributes to its field. In this work, we propose a new task: generating nuanced, expressive, and time-aware impact summaries that capture both praise (confirmation citations) and critique (correction citations) through the evolution of fine-grained citation intents. We introduce an evaluation framework tailored to this task, showing moderate to strong human correlation on subjective metrics such as insightfulness. Expert feedback from professors reveals a strong interest in these summaries and suggests future improvements. Data and code are made available.