Providing mental health support for loved ones across a geographic distance creates unique challenges for the remote caregivers, who sometimes turn to online communities for peer support. We qualitatively analyzed 522 Reddit threads to understand what drives remote caregivers' online help-seeking behaviors and the responses they receive from the community. Their purposes of posting included requesting guidance, expressing emotions, and seeking validation. Community responses included providing emotional support, suggesting informational strategies, and sharing personal experiences. While certain themes in posts (emotional toll, monitoring symptoms, and prioritizing caregiver well-being) are shared across remote and non-remote contexts, remote caregivers' posts surfaced nuanced experiences. For example, they often rely on digital cues, such as voice, to interpret care receivers' well-being while struggling with digital silence during crises. We discuss the need for supporting communication and information sharing between remote caregivers and receivers, care coordination for crisis management, and design recommendations for caregiver communities.
In the context of digital therapy interventions, such as internet-delivered Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (iCBT) for the treatment of depression and anxiety, extensive research has shown how the involvement of a human supporter or coach, who assists the person undergoing treatment, improves user engagement in therapy and leads to more effective health outcomes than unsupported interventions. Seeking to maximize the effects and outcomes of this human support, the research investigates how new opportunities provided through recent advances in the field of AI and machine learning (ML) can contribu…
Unaccompanied migrant youth, fleeing to a new country without their parents, are exposed to mental health risks. Resilience interventions mitigate such risks, but access can be hindered by systemic and personal barriers. While much work has recently addressed designing technology to promote mental health, none has focused on the needs of these populations. This paper presents the results of interviews with 18 professional/ volunteer support workers and 5 unaccompanied migrant youths, followed by three design workshops. The results point to the diverse systems that can facilitate youths' resili…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are enabling systems that augment and collaborate with humans to perform simple, mechanistic tasks like scheduling meetings and grammar-checking text. However, such Human-AI collaboration poses challenges for more complex, creative tasks, such as carrying out empathic conversations, due to difficulties of AI systems in understanding complex human emotions and the open-ended nature of these tasks. Here, we focus on peer-to-peer mental health support, a setting in which empathy is critical for success, and examine how AI can collaborate with humans to fac…
Seeking Late Night Life Lines: Experiences of Conversational AI Use in Mental Health Crisis
University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）；Northwestern University（西北大学）；Dartmouth College（达特茅斯学院）；Microsoft（微软）；Mental Health America（心理健康美国）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
The application of Self-Determination Theory to understand online help-seeking and the design of online help-seeking technologies presents an interesting avenue for investigation. Improving motivation to engage in the help-seeking process could be achieved using the Basic Psychological Needs Theory as a structure to guide the design of online help-seeking technologies and online mental health resources. Positive online help-seeking experiences have an important role to play in sustained help-seeking and improved health outcomes.
The issue of Internet addiction has become a serious social and health issue in East Asian countries. There are only a few treatment programs for Internet addiction, and their effectiveness with people from East Asian remains unclear. As support and treatment develop, it is necessary to understand cultural preferences for dealing with this concern. Using data from the East Asian Social Survey (EASS), this study examined preferred sources of assistance for help with internet use problems in four countries - China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Preferences for kin versus non-kin support, use o…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学）
The growing demand for mental health support has highlighted the importance of conversational agents as human supporters worldwide and in China. These agents could increase availability and reduce the relative costs of mental health support. The provided support can be divided into two main types: cognitive and emotional support. Existing work on this topic mainly focuses on constructing agents that adopt Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) principles. Such agents operate based on pre-defined templates and exercises to provide cognitive support. However, research on emotional support using such…
From Risk Avoidance to User Empowerment in AI Mental Health Crisis Support
Dartmouth College（达特茅斯学院）；Northwestern University（西北大学）；University of California San Francisco（加州大学旧金山分校）；University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；LivingWorks；Florida State University（佛罗里达州立大学）；Microsoft（微软）；Boston University（波士顿大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Mental Health America（美国心理健康协会）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
Beyond the Single Turn: Reframing Refusals as Dynamic Experiences Embedded in the Context of Mental Health Support Interactions with LLMs
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Washington School of Medicine（华盛顿大学医学院）；Microsoft（微软）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
Linguistic Comparison of AI- and Human-Written Responses to Online Mental Health Queries
Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（Siebel计算与数据科学学院，格拉inger工程学院，伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Department of Psychology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（心理学系，文理学院，伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology（交互计算学院，计算机学院，佐治亚理工学院）
