Treatment guidelines for major depressive disorder

Treatment guidelines represent attempts to describe a set of best practices based on the available empirical evidence and current clinical consensus. The American Psychiatric Association has recently revised its guideline for the treatment of major depression. The revised guideline clearly improves upon the original in many respects and is more closely tied to the empirica l literature. It provides an excellent overview of the nature of depression and its pharmacological treatment. It also does a better job than the orig inal of differentiating between those psychosocial interventions that have done well in empirical trials (like the cognitive behavioral interventions and interpersonal psychotherapy) versus those that have not, like the more traditional dynamic interventions. Nonetheless, it still understates the ca se for the empirically supported psychosocial interventions, which compare favorably to drugs in the reduction of acute distress and may have broader and more enduring effects.