Distinguishing between treatment efficacy and effectiveness in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): Implications for contentious therapies

Research psychologists often complain that practitioners disregard research evidence whilst practitioners sometimes accuse researchers of failing to produce evidence with sufficient ecological validity. We discuss the tension that thus arises using the specific illustrative examples of two treatment methods for post-traumatic stress disorder: eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing and exposure-based interventions. We discuss the contextual reasons for the success or failure of particular treatment models that are often only tangentially related to the theoretical underpinnings of the models. We discuss what might be learnt from these debates and develop recommendations for future research.