Treatment guidelines: The good, the bad, and the ugly

Treatment guidelines for psychotherapy describe a set of best practices bas ed in part on scientific evidence. There have been several sets of such gui delines published recently by governmental, professional, and health servic es organizations. The adequacy of such guidelines, which perforce reduce th e variability of professional services, depends on the adequacy of the scie ntific evidence with respect to both efficacy and clinical utility. The Ame rican Psychological Association formed a Task Force to develop a Template f or Developing Guidelines in order to evaluate the scientific evidence for t hese guidelines. This article describes the Template and then applies it to a set of recently promulgated guidelines. The Template was able to demonst rate the strengths and weaknesses of the various documents.