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This paper introduces LongCounsel-8, a benchmark suite designed to facilitate longitudinal tracking of depression through multi-session counseling dialogues, addressing the lack of standardized session-level depression labels in existing datasets. By creating three datasets comprising 7,749 five-session counseling trajectories, the authors ensure longitudinal consistency and diversity while simulating realistic client profiles and symptom progressions. Key findings indicate that traditional single-session assessments may misrepresent trends in depression severity, particularly in worsening cases, highlighting the need for more reliable longitudinal tracking methods.
Traditional single-session assessments can mislead clinicians by failing to accurately track worsening depression trends, underscoring the need for longitudinal approaches.
Tracking depression from multi-session counseling dialogues requires estimating both current symptom severity and how it changes across sessions. Yet progress on this task is constrained by the scarcity of longitudinal counseling data with standardized session-level depression labels. Existing resources typically provide either multi-session conversations without depression labels or labeled interviews in a single session. Building such a benchmark poses three challenges: maintaining longitudinal consistency and diversity, grounding symptom progression in empirical patterns, and expressing controlled depression states naturally without exposing target labels. To address these challenges, we introduce LongCounsel-8, a benchmark suite of three independently generated datasets totaling 7,749 five-session counseling trajectories, grounded in real-world client profiles, depression trajectories, symptom compositions, and counseling patterns. We combine profile-grounded simulation, empirically informed state construction, and indirect behavioral realization to address these challenges. Across the benchmark, simulated self-reports closely recover the controlled states, supporting label fidelity. Experiments on existing depression tracking methods reveal three key findings: (1) lower single-session score error does not guarantee accurate identification of trend, i.e., improvement or worsening; (2) existing methods are consistently less reliable on worsening trajectories; and (3) additional session history may reduce the accuracy of trend prediction. Together, these findings establish LongCounsel-8 as a foundation for advancing depression assessment from static, single-session prediction toward reliable longitudinal tracking of mental-health change.
