[Difficulties of animal experiments in psychopharmacology. Punctual aspects of antidepressants]

Animal psychopharmacological experimentation encounters great difficulty due to the lack of animal models for reproducing mental illness. This results from the greatly complex fashion of CNS, the lack of knowledge of biochemical and/or anatomical substrates of psychiatric pathology, and the difficulty in placing some CNS functions, such as memory and vice versa. The application of selective neurotoxins capable of specifically destroying a neuronal nucleus allows to advance in the knowledge of the CNS functions. Some easy experimental methods allow a quick investigation of certain pharmacological effects on CNS, though they have to be completed with more complex models. It is difficult to investigate the possible antidepressant effect because it is related to different mechanisms of action, it has an onset delay, and some trials which are positive to some drug with no antidepressant effect. In turn they have no right answer to other drugs with confirmed clinical efficacy. The forced swimming pool test that appears to be the most convenient for researching the possible antidepressant effect has been studied, although it should be completed with a spontaneous motility test.