Medication and psychosocial therapy are the two main components in psychiatric care; however, there is a great deal of variation in clinicians in their practice. Thus, there is a need to disseminate more standardized care. The Effectiveness of Guidelines for Dissemination and Education in psychiatric treatment (EGUIDE) project was launched to disseminate, educate, and validate psychiatric treatment guidelines. The EGUIDE project conducted real world surveys to clarify psychiatric treatment and performed 141 guideline training sessions for schizophrenia and major depressive disorder with approximately 3,500 participants to disseminate, educate, and validate psychiatric treatment guidelines. A one-day training course on each guideline significantly improved understanding of the guidelines and Shared Decision Making (SDM), in which doctors and patients discuss and decide on treatment. Furthermore, the practice of the guidelines was shown to improve continuously over several years after the course compared to the pre-course period. A survey of conditions in psychiatric care reported that guidelines were not widely used. For example, antipsychotic monotherapy is recommended for schizophrenia; however, the monotherapy rate at discharge in Japan is 57% with a wide variation from hospital to hospital, ranging from 0% to 100%. Patients whose primary physicians had attended the course showed higher rates of receiving the antipsychotic monotherapy recommended for schizophrenia and the antidepressant monotherapy recommended for major depressive disorder than patients whose primary physicians had not attended the course, suggesting the effectiveness of the training. Conducting training courses on a nationwide scale with the aim of equalization of standard psychiatric care in the future is necessary. Bringing together practitioners from across the country who are engaged in such activities and who share the same philosophy regarding psychiatry and medical care will improve dissemination and education for the next generation.
 Authors' abstract