35 organisations have expressed concern over the draft 2018 NICE guidelines for depression. This letter to the BMJ summarises their points. In a joint stakeholder position statement, six methodological issues were raised. These were: that patient experience research has been left out; that long-term outcome data has been left out; that chronic and complex forms of depression have been separated into misleading categories of depression; that severity has been misrepresented, disadvantaging people with the most severe forms of depression; that an experimental and confounded network meta-analysis has been used as a primary rather than supplementary basis for recommendations; that quality of life outcomes have been left out.
