Serenify: An AI-Powered Virtual Therapist for Accessible Mental Health Support

Abstract

Mental health issues affect millions of people around the world, but getting access to professional therapy isn’t always easy. The reasons vary — therapy can be expensive, there’s still a social stigma attached to it in many places, and there just aren’t enough trained professionals to meet the growing demand. That’s where Serenify comes in. It’s a virtual therapist powered by AI, built to help make mental health support more accessible, affordable, and consistent. Using tools like natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and memory retention, Serenify offers therapy sessions that feel more personal and relevant to each user. At the heart of it is Sentinel, our sentiment analysis model, which is good at picking up on emotional cues so the responses feel more thoughtful and in tune with the user’s state of mind. In this paper, we’ll walk through how Serenify was built, the technologies behind it, and why it could make a real difference in the way we approach digital mental health care.

Introduction

Mental health is crucial for well-being, but many people face barriers to traditional therapy such as cost, stigma, and access. Serenify is an AI-driven virtual therapist designed to provide affordable, real-time, personalized mental health support using advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) techniques.

Serenify’s key innovation is a custom sentiment analysis model based on a bidirectional LSTM architecture, achieving 85.9% accuracy in detecting subtle emotional cues. Unlike earlier AI tools, Serenify remembers past conversations to track emotional trends over time, creating a more continuous and meaningful therapeutic experience.

The system integrates CBT and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), supports journaling with emotional tone analysis, and is accessible across platforms with cloud syncing. Privacy and security are prioritized through encryption, local data processing, and user anonymity options.

Early feedback shows users feel significantly more understood compared to other AI mental health apps. Future plans include biometric and multimodal emotion detection (voice, facial expressions), wearable integration for real-time stress monitoring, gamification for engagement, and hybrid AI-human therapy models.

The core sentiment analysis model, Sentinel-Mk-1, builds on RoBERTa transformers, fine-tuned with diverse datasets combining clinical, social media, and youth slang language. This allows Serenify to understand a wide emotional spectrum and provide nuanced, empathetic responses.

Serenify aims to make mental health support scalable, stigma-free, and accessible to all, complementing human therapists by providing continuous, personalized emotional insights.

Conclusion

Serenify is a breakthrough in AI mental health support, addressing the flaws of previous apps with advanced features like memory retention and a highly accurate sentiment analysis model (85.9%). It provides accessible, stigma-free support to millions, acting as a vital first-line resource, though not a substitute for human therapy. With continuous improvements and the integration of wearable tech, Serenify is set to revolutionize digital mental health care. By applying lessons from past failures and using advanced AI techniques, it offers empathetic, effective care where others have fallen short.

References

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Copyright

Copyright © 2025 Vidul Pratap Chauhan, Vaishali Goel. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.