A NICE year for CBT and a CBT year for NICE

Extract

This is going to be an interesting year for CBT. The National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) unveils a series of treatment guidelines this year. These guidelines are intended to support good practice in clinical settings; implicitly, they also seek to discourage ineffective or bad practice. It is becoming evident that CBT is likely to be judged as a first line treatment (or the first line treatment) in a range of anxiety disorders, depression and eating disorders. Other issues which will be tackled include the lack of evidence for just about all other psychological treatment approaches, that CBT should be readily and rapidly available where it is needed and the need for quality control linked with (but not confined to) proper training and supervision of therapists. Early identification of clinical difficulties and a better research understanding of the extent and limitations of current psychological and pharmacological treatments are also likely to be advocated. These are all issues which greatly concern the Association and this journal, and as editor I look forward to receiving empirically based submissions addressing these topics.