Models of Depression Used in the Pharmaceutical Industry

An animal model is a representation of some aspects of a human disease. Modeling mental disease is problematic in that the symptoms may be poorly defined and the underlying pathophysiology poorly understood. This is especially true of depression, which is the name given to a heterogeneous group of disorders having in common the disturbance of mood (Cronholm, 1984; Klerman, 1984; Baldessarini, 1985). Models of depression are made primarily for two reasons: to allow experimental manipulation of behavioral and biochemical variables that might provide insight into the etiology and underlying pathophysiology of the disease and to allow prediction of how a variable such as an antidepressant drug might affect the disease (Everitt and Keverne, 1979).