VERA-MH: Validation of Ethical and Responsible AI in Mental Health

Chatbot usage has increased, including in fields for which they were never developed for--notably mental health support. To that end, we introduce Validations of Ethical and Responsible AI in Mental Health (VERA-MH), a novel clinically-validated evaluation for safety of chatbots in the context of mental health support. The first iteration of VERA-MH focuses on Suicidal Ideation (SI) risks, by assessing how well chatbots can responds to users that might be in crisis. VERA-MH is comprised of three steps: conversation simulation, conversation judging and model rating. First, to simulate conversations with the chatbot under evaluation, another chatbot is tasked with role-playing users based on specific personas. Such user personas have been developed under clinical guidance, to make sure that, among others, multiple risk factors, demographic characteristics and disclosure factors were represented. In the judging step, a second support model is used as an LLM-as-a-Judge, together with a clinically-developed rubric. The rubric is structured as a flow, with a single Yes/No question asked each time, to improve answers' consistency and highlight models' failure modes. In the last stage, results of each conversation are aggregated to present the final evaluation of the chatbot. Together with the framework, we present the result of the evaluations for four leading LLM providers.

VERA-MH: Reliability and Validity of an Open-Source AI Safety Evaluation in Mental Health

Millions now use leading generative AI chatbots for psychological support. Despite the promise related to availability and scale, the single most pressing question in AI for mental health is whether these tools are safe. The Validation of Ethical and Responsible AI in Mental Health (VERA-MH) evaluation was recently proposed to meet the urgent need for an evidence-based automated safety benchmark. This study aimed to examine the clinical validity and reliability of the VERA-MH evaluation for AI safety in suicide risk detection and response. We first simulated a large set of conversations between large language model (LLM)-based users (user-agents) and general-purpose AI chatbots. Licensed mental health clinicians used a rubric (scoring guide) to independently rate the simulated conversations for safe and unsafe chatbot behaviors, as well as user-agent realism. An LLM-based judge used the same scoring rubric to evaluate the same set of simulated conversations. We then compared rating alignment across (a) individual clinicians and (b) clinician consensus and the LLM judge, and (c) examined clinicians' ratings of user-agent realism. Individual clinicians were generally consistent with one another in their safety ratings (chance-corrected inter-rater reliability [IRR]: 0.77), thus establishing a gold-standard clinical reference. The LLM judge was strongly aligned with this clinical consensus (IRR: 0.81) overall and within key conditions. Clinician raters generally perceived the user-agents to be realistic. For the potential mental health benefits of AI chatbots to be realized, attention to safety is paramount. Findings from this human evaluation study support the clinical validity and reliability of VERA-MH: an open-source, fully automated AI safety evaluation for mental health. Further research will address VERA-MH generalizability and robustness.