Towards Youth Mental Health Support: Developing a Prototype AI Counselor

Many youths suffer from mental, emotional, and behavioral illnesses. Prevention and treatment require health professionals with empathetic and dedicated guidance that takes time and frequent interfaces. Frequent visits to the professionals are not always afforded for many youths. Automated AI chatbot can be a good alternative to visits to professionals. In this study, an AI chatbot is designed and implemented with youth engagement. Their engagement is aimed to identify the requirements for the automated consulting chatbot, and to generate responses that are using language style more relatable to youths. As a preliminary study, youth engagement was data analytics to understand drug overdose status. Their input was used to identify design requirements that can help the youth on drug issues. A prototype ChatDemi is implemented, trained with youth generated response dataset to show the feasibility of AI-driven virtual counselor that generate responses to meet the needs of youths to cope with drug abuse or other behavioral and mental illness prevention and treatment.