Domain-Specific Constitutional AI: Enhancing Safety in LLM-Powered Mental Health Chatbots

Abstract: Mental health applications have emerged as a critical area in computational health, driven by rising global rates of mental illness, the integration of AI in psychological care, and the need for scalable solutions in underserved communities. These include therapy chatbots, crisis detection, and wellness platforms handling sensitive data, requiring specialized AI safety beyond general safeguards due to emotional vulnerability, risks like misdiagnosis or symptom exacerbation, and precise management of vulnerable states to avoid severe outcomes such as self-harm or loss of trust. Despite AI safety advances, general safeguards inadequately address mental health-specific challenges, including crisis intervention accuracy to avert escalations, therapeutic guideline adherence to prevent misinformation, scale limitations in resource-constrained settings, and adaptation to nuanced dialogues where generics may introduce biases or miss distress signals. We introduce an approach to apply Constitutional AI training with domain-specific mental health principles for safe, domain-adapted CAI systems in computational mental health applications.