EIAPsy: A Phase-Aware Progressive Framework for Online Psychological Counseling

Online psychological counseling systems offer more accessible mental health intervention pathways. However, current systems primarily explore problem causes or provide personality-tailored recommendations while exhibiting significant deficiencies in actual intervention. They lack adequate humanized care, struggle to convey empathetic understanding, and fail to help clients establish sufficient presence and emotional connection in the online environment, thereby affecting intervention effectiveness. This paper addresses the challenge of constructing a progressive psychological counseling dialogue system that enhances clients' emotional connection and engagement to achieve targeted intervention. We propose EIAPsy, a phase-aware psychological counseling dialogue generation framework with self-feedback that orchestrates interactions between client and counselor agents, while employing a supervisor agent to assess counseling progress and dynamically adjust strategies and phase transitions. Using this framework, we develop EIAPsyD, a three-phase psychological counseling dialogue dataset encompassing Exploration, Insight, and Action phases, comprising 7,500 dialogues. We further develop EIAPsyM by fine-tuning large language models on our dataset. Experimental results confirm that EIAPsy enhances emotional connection and intervention efficacy.