Exploring the Efficacy of Large Language Models in Summarizing Mental Health Counseling Sessions: Benchmark Study.

BACKGROUND: Comprehensive session summaries enable effective continuity in mental health counseling, facilitating informed therapy planning. However, manual summarization presents a significant challenge, diverting experts' attention from the core counseling process. Leveraging advances in automatic summarization to streamline the summarization process addresses this issue because this enables mental health professionals to access concise summaries of lengthy therapy sessions, thereby increasing their efficiency. However, existing approaches often overlook the nuanced intricacies inherent in counseling interactions. OBJECTIVE: This study evaluates the effectiveness of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) in selectively summarizing various components of therapy sessions through aspect-based summarization, aiming to benchmark their performance. METHODS: We first created Mental Health Counseling-Component-Guided Dialogue Summaries, a benchmarking data set that consists of 191 counseling sessions with summaries focused on 3 distinct counseling components (also known as counseling aspects). Next, we assessed the capabilities of 11 state-of-the-art LLMs in addressing the task of counseling-component-guided summarization. The generated summaries were evaluated quantitatively using standard summarization metrics and verified qualitatively by mental health professionals. RESULTS: Our findings demonstrated the superior performance of task-specific LLMs such as MentalLlama, Mistral, and MentalBART evaluated using standard quantitative metrics such as Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation (ROUGE)-1, ROUGE-2, ROUGE-L, and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers Score across all aspects of the counseling components. Furthermore, expert evaluation revealed that Mistral superseded both MentalLlama and MentalBART across 6 parameters: affective attitude, burden, ethicality, coherence, opportunity costs, and perceived effectiveness. However, these models exhibit a common weakness in terms of room for improvement in the opportunity costs and perceived effectiveness metrics. CONCLUSIONS: While LLMs fine-tuned specifically on mental health domain data display better performance based on automatic evaluation scores, expert assessments indicate that these models are not yet reliable for clinical application. Further refinement and validation are necessary before their implementation in practice.

Clinical hypnosis and Patanjali yoga sutras.

The trance states in yoga and hypnosis are associated with similar phenomena like relaxation, disinclination to talk, unreality, misrepresentation, alterations in perception, increased concentration, suspension of normal reality testing, and the temporary nature of the phenomena. While some researchers consider yoga to be a form of hypnosis, others note that there are many similarities between the trance in yoga and the hypnotic trance. The present study aimed to find similarities between the trance states of hypnosis and Patanjali's yoga sutras. The trance states were compared with the understanding of the phenomena of trance, and the therapeutic techniques and benefits of both. An understanding of the concept of trance in Patanjali's yoga sutras was gained through a thematic analysis of the book Four Chapters on Freedom by Swami Satyananda Saraswati. This led to an understanding of the concept of trance in the yoga sutras. The obtained concepts were compared to the concepts of trance in hypnosis (obtained through the literature on hypnosis) to investigate whether or not there exist similarities. The findings of the study show that there are similarities between the trance in hypnosis and the trance in Patanjali's yoga sutras in the induction and deepening of the trance states in hypnosis and that of Samadhi, the phenomena present in hypnosis and the kinds of siddhis that are obtained through Samadhi, and the therapeutic techniques and the therapeutic process in Patanjali's yoga sutra and hypnosis.