Empirically supported treatments for children and adolescents: Where to from here?

In this commentary, we provide additional detail about the movement to identify, evaluate, and disseminate empirically supported treatments (ESTs), suggest a Web-based strategy that might prove useful in disseminating ESTs, and comment on professional and ethical issues associated with the use and failure to use ESTs. We provide a series of Web-based recommendations and then assert that the ongoing practice of invalidated treatments not only is bad practice, but also may be unethical. The children, adolescents, and families the profession serves deserve the very best it has to offer them. It is our responsibility as practicing professionals to keep abreast of developments about which treatments work and which ones do not. Further, if we are not proficient in those strategies that do work, then we need to refer children with these problems to professionals who are. We recognize the boldness of our assertion but suggest that if we stay the course and are successful in disseminating these interventions, they will become “treatment as usual” over time.