MentraSuite: Post-Training Large Language Models for Mental Health Reasoning and Assessment
Authors: name: Mengxi Xiao; name: Kailai Yang; name: Pengde Zhao; name: Enze Zhang; name: Ziyan Kuang; name: Zhiwei Liu; name: Weiguang Han; name: Shu Liao; name: Lianting Huang; name: Jinpeng Hu; name: Min Peng; name: Qianqian Xie; name: Sophia Ananiadou
Published: 2025-12-10 13:26:22

Abstract: Mental health disorders affect hundreds of millions globally, and the Web now serves as a primary medium for accessing support, information, and assessment. Large language models (LLMs) offer scalable and accessible assistance, yet their deployment in mental-health settings remains risky when their reasoning is incomplete, inconsistent, or ungrounded. Existing psychological LLMs emphasize emotional understanding or knowledge recall but overlook the step-wise, clinically aligned reasoning required for appraisal, diagnosis, intervention planning, abstraction, and verification. To address these issues, we introduce MentraSuite, a unified framework for advancing reliable mental-health reasoning. We propose MentraBench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning five core reasoning aspects, six tasks, and 13 datasets, evaluating both task performance and reasoning quality across five dimensions: conciseness, coherence, hallucination avoidance, task understanding, and internal consistency. We further present Mindora, a post-trained model optimized through a hybrid SFT-RL framework with an inconsistency-detection reward to enforce faithful and coherent reasoning. To support training, we construct high-quality trajectories using a novel reasoning trajectory generation strategy, that strategically filters difficult samples and applies a structured, consistency-oriented rewriting process to produce concise, readable, and well-balanced trajectories. Across 20 evaluated LLMs, Mindora achieves the highest average performance on MentraBench and shows remarkable performances in reasoning reliability, demonstrating its effectiveness for complex mental-health scenarios.