The NICE guidelines are misleading,unscientific, and potentially impede good psychological care and help

NICE guidelines have been given the authority to determine what psychological therapies can be provided within the UK National Health Service. This also has implications for private practice. The guidelines are based on a medical model and consider psychotherapy as analogous to a drug. Psychological thinking is discouraged by this approach. A large amount of psychotherapy research evidence is ignored by NICE, particularly the persistent finding that differences in effectiveness between therapies are minimal and elusive. Differences between the skills of therapists are a more significant factor. Practice-based evidence, and learning from the patient's feedback (both conscious and unconscious) may be a better approach. For most forms of psychological distress, none of the main psychological therapies studied in randomized controlled trials can be considered to be clinically effective, even though they facilitate some degree of statistically significant change.