Looking for Mental Health Support Datasets for building a Multi-turn Chatbot

Here’s a short, engaging reply you can post. It’s helpful, safety-aware, and not salesy.

Hi, good question and you are right, high quality mental health dialogue data is rare for privacy and safety reasons.

A few directions that usually help:

1. Broaden search terms beyond “mental health chatbot” Try “empathetic dialogue”, “supportive conversation”, “counseling dialogue”, “distress support”, “crisis counseling”, “peer support forum”.

2. Look at adjacent dialogue datasets Even if they are not strictly clinical, empathetic and supportive conversation datasets can work well for training multi turn responses and then you add your own safety rules for self harm or crisis escalation.

3. Consider a hybrid approach Use RAG with vetted mental health resources for factual guidance, and use conversation data mainly to learn tone, reflection, and asking gentle clarifying questions. This reduces the risk of the model inventing advice.

4. Safety note If you deploy for anxiety or depression, plan for guardrails. Clear disclaimers, crisis escalation paths, and refusal behaviors for self harm content are important.

Quick question so people can give better pointers. Are you aiming for general supportive coaching, or clinical style counseling, and do you need it in English only or multilingual?