Effective mental health support is crucial for alleviating psychological distress. While large language model (LLM)-based assistants have shown promise in mental health interventions, existing research often defines "effective" support primarily in terms of empathetic acknowledgments, overlooking other essential dimensions such as informational guidance, community validation, and tangible coping strategies. To address this limitation and better understand what constitutes effective support, we introduce RedditESS, a novel real-world dataset derived from Reddit posts, including supportive comments and original posters' follow-up responses. Grounded in established social science theories, we develop an ensemble labeling mechanism to annotate supportive comments as effective or not and perform qualitative assessments to ensure the reliability of the annotations. Additionally, we demonstrate the practical utility of RedditESS by using it to guide LLM alignment toward generating more context-sensitive and genuinely helpful supportive responses. By broadening the understanding of effective support, our study paves the way for advanced AI-driven mental health interventions.

翻译：有效的心理健康支持对于缓解心理困扰至关重要。虽然基于大语言模型（LLM）的助手在心理健康干预中已显示出潜力，但现有研究通常将“有效”支持主要定义为共情性回应，而忽视了其他关键维度，如信息指导、社群认同和具体的应对策略。为弥补这一局限并更好地理解有效支持的构成，我们引入了RedditESS——一个源自Reddit帖子的新颖真实世界数据集，包含支持性评论及原始发帖者的后续回应。基于成熟的社会科学理论，我们开发了一种集成标注机制，将支持性评论标注为有效或无效，并进行了定性评估以确保标注的可靠性。此外，我们通过使用RedditESS指导LLM对齐以生成更具情境敏感性和真正有帮助的支持性回应，展示了其实用价值。通过拓宽对有效支持的理解，本研究为先进的人工智能驱动心理健康干预铺平了道路。