Cautions on the overgeneralized application of the NICE and CREST recommendations for the treatment of PTSD in the UK: a reflection from practice in Belfast, Northern Ireland

The task of this paper is to present a message of caution regarding the overgeneralized reliance on the NICE (2005) and CREST (2003) recommendations for the treatment of post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adults in the United Kingdom. The socio‐political and ethnocultural context of Northern Ireland is used as a foundation to explore the generalizibility of guideline recommendations. It is argued that clinicians should be mindful of the degree to which they generalize from the recommendations of these guidelines to their clinical work because (1) questions regarding the heterogeneity of PTSD raise as yet unaddressed empirical questions about the generalizability of treatments to all PTSD presentations and (2) ethnocultural and socio‐political factors have not yet played a dominant role in randomized outcome studies of treatment efficacy.