LLM-Driven Conversational Agents for Mental Health Support with Long-Term User Behavior Modeling
Keywords:
conversational agents, large language models, mental health, behavior modeling, user memory systems, responsible AI, system architecture, telehealthAbstract
The rapid advancement of large language models has opened new frontiers for digital mental health interventions, yet the design of conversational agents capable of providing sustained, personalized support over long durations remains a formidable systems challenge. This paper presents a comprehensive architectural and infrastructural analysis of LLM-driven conversational agents that incorporate long-term user behavior modeling to deliver context-aware, empathetic, and clinically sensitive mental health support. We examine the full lifecycle of such systems, from session-level dialogue management to longitudinal memory architectures that encode user emotional trajectories, adherence patterns, and evolving psychological states. The discussion integrates perspectives from distributed systems, responsible AI, health informatics, and public policy, foregrounding trade-offs between personalization depth and computational scalability, latency constraints in real-time therapeutic dialogues, and the tension between rich behavioral modeling and user privacy preservation. The paper critically evaluates modular pipeline designs, retrieval-augmented memory stores, hierarchical summarization strategies, and hybrid symbolic-neural controllers for safety enforcement. Governance frameworks are analyzed through the lens of medical device regulations, data sovereignty, and algorithmic fairness across diverse demographic groups. Emphasis is placed on deployment strategies that bridge research prototypes and production-grade telehealth platforms, addressing model updating without catastrophic forgetting of user-specific therapeutic alliances, and the orchestration of on-device and cloud-based inference for low-resource settings. The work articulates a socio-technical roadmap that aligns engineering capabilities with the ethical imperatives of mental healthcare, arguing that longevity of interaction, rather than single-session accuracy, constitutes the central design metric for sustainable digital support ecosystems.
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This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
