Artificial Intelligence in Mental Health and Counseling Practices

Dear Colleagues,

We are delighted to introduce our forthcoming Special Issue of Behavioral Sciences focused on artificial intelligence in behavioral health. This timely collection explores the intersection between AI technologies and behavioral health assessment, interventions, and treatment.

The rapid evolution of AI has created unprecedented opportunities to enhance mental health care delivery through personalized interventions, predictive analytics, and improved accessibility. This Special Issue will bring together interdisciplinary perspectives from the fields of psychology, psychiatry, computer science, and ethics to examine both the potential benefits and the challenges of AI integration in behavioral health settings.

Key themes will include the following topics:

• AI-powered screening and assessment tools that can identify early warning signs of mental health conditions;
• Natural language processing applications for therapeutic conversations and sentiment analysis;
• Machine learning approaches for treatment personalization and outcome prediction;
• Ethical considerations around data privacy, algorithmic bias, and the human–AI therapeutic relationship;
• Implementation frameworks for clinical settings with varying resources and technological capabilities.

The papers in this collection will represent cutting-edge research alongside practical applications already demonstrating efficacy in real-world settings. We are calling for both quantitative studies exploring AI applications and qualitative research examining patient and provider experiences with these emerging technologies. We are also seeking manuscripts that advance clinical understanding of mental health interventions with AI (See Cruz-Gonzalez et al., 2025; Sharma et al., 2024; and Siddals, Torous, & Coxon, 2024).

As behavioral health professions navigate this technological frontier, this Special Issue will serve as both a roadmap for and a critical examination of where AI can meaningfully augment human care and where human connection remains irreplaceable. The ultimate goal is to foster thoughtful integration that amplifies clinical expertise rather than replacing it.

We invite you to engage with these important discussions and contribute to shaping the future of behavioral health care in the age of artificial intelligence.

References

• Cruz-Gonzalez, P., He, A. W. J., Lam, E. P., Ng, I. M. C., Li, M. W., Hou, R., Chan, J. N., Sahni, Y. J., Guasch, N. V., Miller, T., Lau, B. W., & Vidaña, D. I. S. (2025). Artificial intelligence in mental health care: a systematic review of diagnosis, monitoring, and intervention applications. Psychological Medicine, 55, e18.
• Sharma, A., Rushton, K., Lin, I. W., Nguyen, T., & Althoff, T. (2024). Facilitating self-guided mental health interventions through human-language model interaction: A case study of cognitive restructuring. ACM Digital Library, https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3613904.3642761.
• Siddals, S., Torous, J. & Coxon, A. “It happened to be the perfect thing”: experiences of generative AI chatbots for mental health. npj Mental Health Res 3, 48 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44184-024-00097-4.

Dr. Carl John Sheperis
Dr. Donna Sheperis
Dr. Mikael Rubin
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Behavioral Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• artificial intelligence
• mental health
• machine learning
• large language models
• digital health