New benchmark shows top LLMs struggle in real mental health care

Summary

The global demand for mental health support has never been higher, with over one billion people currently living with mental health conditions. As healthcare providers look for solutions to bridge the gap between demand and access, Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising avenue for scalable support.At Sword Health, we have been working to realize this promise by developing our own LLMs specifically aligned for mental health care. However, from the beginning of our development journey, we encountered a critical obstacle: we could not improve what we could not accurately measure. While we could train models to be helpful, answering the fundamental question – can we trust this model to provide safe, effective therapeutic care? – remained elusive. We realized that relying on existing evaluations wasn't enough to guide the development of truly clinical-grade AI. To solve our own development needs, we had to build a new yardstick.Today, we are introducing MindEval, a novel framework designed in collaboration with licensed Clinical Psychologists to evaluate LLMs in realistic, multi-turn mental health conversations. By automating the assessment of clinical skills, MindEval allows us to move beyond basic checks and measure actual therapeutic competence.We believe that safety in healthcare AI should not be a proprietary secret, but a shared foundation. To accelerate the industry’s progress toward clinically safe AI, we are open-sourcing the entire MindEval framework including our expert-designed prompts, code, and evaluation datasets. Our goal is for MindEval to serve as a community-driven standard, giving developers and researchers a reliable yardstick to measure and improve the mental health capabilities of future models.The problem: moving beyond "book knowledge"The deployment of AI in mental health is currently outpacing our ability to evaluate it. As the industry faces rising concerns about the safety of therapeutic chatbots, a core obstacle to creating safer syst...