Towards Building Mental Health Resilience through Storytelling with a Chatbot

The prolonged lockdown from the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a dramatic increase in the number of mental health concerns in the community. Students are among those vastly affected. Their socio-economic and financial conditions add challenges to their academic difficulty and work-life balance that can fuel issues related to mental health and well-being. To cope with these challenges, they need to strengthen their resilience to possess the ability to face and recover from adversity. In this paper, we describe how a mental health chatbot can help strengthen the resilience skills of tertiary level students through daily conversations. These conversations are aimed at promoting one's well-being through self-assessment and care. Grounded on the use of narratives to encourage students to express their emotions, Seligman's PERMA model is utilized as a basis for evaluating the student's well-being and suggesting coping mechanisms to maintain one's positive mental health and emotions.