Graph2Counsel: Clinically Grounded Synthetic Counseling Dialogue Generation from Client Psychological Graphs

Abstract

Rising demand for mental health support has increased interest in using Large Language Models (LLMs) for counseling, but adapting them to this safety-critical domain is hindered by limited real-world data due to privacy constraints. Synthetic datasets provide a promising alternative, but existing approaches often rely on unstructured or semi-structured text inputs and overlook structural dependencies between a client's cognitive, emotional, and behavioral states, leading to psychologically inconsistent and less realistic interactions. We introduce Graph2Counsel, a framework for generating synthetic counseling sessions grounded in Client Psychological Graphs (CPGs) that encode relationships among clients' thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Graph2Counsel uses a structured prompting pipeline guided by counselor strategies and CPG, and explores prompting strategies including CoT and Multi-Agent Feedback. It produces 760 sessions from 76 CPGs across diverse client profiles. In expert evaluation, our dataset outperforms prior datasets on specificity, counselor competence, authenticity, conversational flow, and safety (Krippendorff's $α$ = 0.70). Fine-tuning an open-source model on this dataset improves performance on several metrics on CounselingBench and CounselBench, while matching baselines on others. We further introduce Therapy-Eval, a multi-turn evaluation framework, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our fine-tuned model in realistic therapeutic conversations. We make our code, data and fine-tuned model public.