Towards Facilitating Empathic Conversations in Online Mental Health Support: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

Understand

Online peer-to-peer support platforms enable conversations between millions of people who seek and provide mental health support.

• If successful, web-based mental health conversations could improve access to treatment and reduce the global disease burden.
• Psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated that empathy, the ability to understand and feel the emotions and experiences of others, is a key component leading to positive outcomes in supportive conversations.
• However, recent studies have shown that highly empathic conversations are rare in online mental health platforms.