PSI-Bench: Interpretable and Clinically Meaningful Evaluation of Depression Patient Simulators

Abstract

Patient simulators are gaining traction in mental health training by providing scalable exposure to complex and sensitive patient interactions. Simulating depressed patients is challenging, as safety constraints and high patient variability complicate simulations and underscore the need for simulators that capture diverse and realistic patient behaviors. However, existing evaluations heavily rely on LLM-judges with poorly specified prompts and do not assess behavioral diversity. We introduce PSI-Bench, an automatic evaluation framework that provides interpretable, clinically meaningful diagnostics of depression patient simulator behavior across turn-, dialogue-, and population-level dimensions. Using PSI-Bench, we benchmark seven LLMs across two simulator frameworks and find that simulators produce overly long, lexically diverse responses, show reduced variability, and move through therapeutic stages and toward positive valence too quickly. We also show that the simulation framework has a larger impact on fidelity than the model scale. Results from a human study demonstrate that our benchmark is strongly aligned with judgments of mental health professionals. Our work reveals key limitations of current depression patient simulators and provides an interpretable, extensible benchmark to guide future simulator design and evaluation.