Enhancing Self-Awareness through Guided Self-Talk: Designing a Chatbot to Support Mental Health and Counselor Communication

Mental health challenges are increasingly common among university students, yet many face barriers to accessing care, including limited emotional self-awareness. This paper explores the design and evaluation of Your Mobile Therapist, a LINE-integrated chatbot that guides users through structured self-talk to enhance emotional clarity and support communication with counselors. Grounded in theories of inner speech and reflective practice, the chatbot was developed through participatory design and deployed in a comparative user study involving twelve participants. We evaluated the effects of chatbot-guided reflection against a static control condition using qualitative interviews and counselor feedback. Results show that the chatbot facilitated deeper emotional articulation, especially for users with low expressive confidence, and improved counseling preparedness by generating context-rich emotional narratives. We contribute: (1) the design of a mobile chatbot for guided emotional self-talk; (2) empirical findings on its impact on users’ emotional clarity and counseling engagement; and (3) design implications for integrating AI-generated self-reflection into human-AI collaborative care workflows.