The First Workshop on Multimodal, Multilingual, and Multicultural
Mental Health and Psychotherapy (MultiPsyche 2026)

In Conjunction with AACL-IJCNLP 2026
November 9th, 2026, Zhuhai, China

Paper Submission

Mental health disorders represent a critical global challenge, serving as the leading contributor to illness and disability. Against this backdrop, the rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed a paradigm shift in automated mental health support, offering unprecedented potential for assessment, diagnosis, and treatment. However, the current landscape of LLM-based mental health research remains predominantly text-centric, English-focused, and Western-biased.

We introduce The First Workshop on Multimodal, Multilingual, and Multicultural Mental Health and Psychotherapy (MultiPsyche 2026). By coupling mental health (psychological states) with psychotherapy (intervention mechanisms), we encompass the two dominant landscapes of current multimodal LLM (MLLM)-based mental healthcare, from passive risk detection to active, dialogue-based therapeutic engagement, with a focus on advancing inclusivity and robustness across three key dimensions:

Multimodal Understanding: Exploring how MLLMs can integrate diverse modalities, such as vision, audio, and text, to mirror a clinician’s holistic perception.
Multilingual Accessibility: Seeking resources grounded in a broader range of languages and advancing cross-lingual transfer to democratize access to more high-quality mental health support across diverse linguistic communities.
Multicultural Alignment: Examining how to build culturally aware models that respect diverse social norms and values, recognizing that distinct perceptions of mental illness, stigma, and help-seeking behaviors can vary drastically across different cultural contexts.

Tentative Keynote Speakers

Prof. Minlie Huang

Prof. Minlie Huang is the deputy director of the Foundation Model Center of Tsinghua University. He was supported by the National Distinguished Young Scholar project. His research fields include language generation, foundation models, AI alignment/safety/ethics, and social intelligence. He has published more than 400 papers in premier conferences and journals (e.g., ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR), with over 32,000 citations and an h-index of 88, and won several best papers or nominations at major conferences (e.g., ACL, IJCAI, SIGDIAL, and NLPCC). He was selected as an Elsevier China Highly Cited Scholar since 2022 and the AI 2000 list of the world's most influential AI scholars since 2020. He was a key contributor to various large foundation models such as ChatGLM, GLM-4.7, GLM4.6V, and CharacterGLM. He serves as an associate editor for TACL, CL, TNNLS, and TBD, and a senior area chair of ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, and IJCAI more than 10 times.

Prof. Joseph Kambeitz

Prof. Joseph Kambeitz is a researcher, psychiatrist, and psychologist with 10+ years of experience in data science, machine learning, and simulation modeling applied to mental health. He studied psychology and medicine and was trained as a psychiatrist at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Since 2019, he has worked as the head of the KambeitzLab for prevention and prediction in mental health and the early recognition service at the University of Cologne (FETZ). He also serves as a vice director of the department of psychiatry. His research focuses on building interpretable and scalable models of health outcomes using methods ranging from classical statistics to LLM-powered simulations and NLP. He has published 200+ papers on premier journals, such as Science, Nature Mental Health, npj Digital Medicine, JAMA Psychiatry, and The British Journal of Psychiatry.

Dr. Jiahuan Pei

Dr. Jiahuan Pei is an assistant professor with the Social AI Group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, focusing on multimodal agents for conversational AI. She has pursued her Ph.D. with the IRLab at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interest includes NLP (dialogue systems, word embedding, parsing, and summarization) and information retrieval (query understanding, recommender systems, and matcher embedding). She has published over $40$ papers on top-tier conferences such as ACL, EMNLP, COLING, AAAI, WWW, SIGIR, CIKM, MM, and CSCW. She served as a program chair for INLG 2025 and an area chair for NLPCC 2025.