"AI Counsellor": LLM-Based Counselling Chatbot for University Students
: The growing demand for mental health services has led to the rapid emergence of digital mental health applications. Simultaneously, recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have enabled the development of high-performance chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs). Our paper explored the potential of an LLM-based mental health counselling chatbot for university students. We developed the chatbot using the QLoRA fine-tuning approach of a lightweight open-source LLM on curated counselling transcript data. We evaluated the system in a user study, with 30 university students, and found that a single chatbot counselling session reduced negative emotions significantly. Overall, our results suggested that LLM-based counselling chatbots present promising opportunities for AI-driven mental health interventions.