Comments on NICE Guidelines for 'Depression in Children and Young People'

The recent NICE depression guidelines recommend that cognitive-behavioural and interpersonal psychotherapies should be the treatments of choice for child or adolescent depression. This paper argues that in so doing, NICE goes beyond the evidence adduced and judges too much relevant data ineligible. This is likely to be due to a methodology developed for biomedicine, where NICE-eligible data are substantial. Consequently, NICE risks distorting practice in a small specialty where randomised controlled trials are comparatively rare and usually involve small samples.