Mental health counseling is an enterprise with profound societal importance where conversations play a primary role.In order to acquire the conversational skills needed to face a challenging range of situations, mental health counselors must rely on training and on continued experience with actual clients.However, in the absence of large scale longitudinal studies, the nature and significance of this developmental process remain unclear.For example, prior literature suggests that experience might not translate into consequential changes in counselor behavior.This has led some to even argue that counseling is a profession without expertise.In this work, we develop a computational framework to quantify the extent to which individuals change their linguistic behavior with experience and to study the nature of this evolution.We use our framework to conduct a large longitudinal study of mental health counseling conversations, tracking over 3,400 counselors across their tenure.We reveal that overall, counselors do indeed change their conversational behavior to become more diverse across interactions, developing an individual voice that distinguishes them from other counselors.Furthermore, a finer-grained investigation shows that the rate and nature of this diversification vary across functionally different conversational components.

Text-based counseling and support systems have seen an increasing proliferation in the past decade. We present Fathom, a natural language interface to help crisis counselors on Crisis Text Line, a new 911-like crisis hotline that takes calls via text messaging rather than voice. Text messaging opens up the opportunity for software to read the messages as well as people, and to provide assistance for human counselors who give clients emotional and practical support. Crisis counseling is a tough job that requires dealing with emotionally stressed people in possibly life-critical situations, under time constraints. Fathom is a system that provides topic modeling of calls and graphical visualization of topic distributions, updated in real time. We develop a mixed-initiative paradigm to train coherent topic and word distributions and use them to power real-time visualizations aimed at reducing counselor cognitive overload. We believe Fathom to be the first real-time computational framework to assist in crisis counseling.