Empathy in Diversity: Personalized Depression and Anxiety Therapy via Dialogue State Tracking and Patient-Aware Planning

Large language model (LLM) dialogue agents are increasingly used in psychological therapy, yet robustness across diverse patients remains underexplored. We address this gap with three contributions: (1) MindEval, a realistic role-play protocol for evaluating therapeutic dialogue agents; (2) MindData, a deidentified, expert-annotated corpus of therapist-patient dialogues (2,573 sessions; 63,348 turns); and (3) MindApt, a framework that integrates a therapeutic dialogue state tracking paradigm with a patient-aware strategic planning module. On MindEval, MindApt outperforms strong baselines on therapeutic outcomes and dialogue quality while improving conversational efficiency. To evaluate utility beyond role-play, we conducted a clinical study with real patients, demonstrating that MindAptguided care achieves outcomes comparable to therapist-determined care, while the hybrid setting combining therapist judgment with Min-dApt's recommendations yields the strongest overall outcomes.