Animal models help understand the possible pathways involved in a
disease's pathophysiology, and they offer a significant test to screen the potential of a
therapeutic compound. Depression is a chronic mental illness that affects the world's
population widely. There are different behavioral and non-behavioral models of
depression used in experimental animals to explore and understand the primary
mechanism of depression. These models produce different types of depressive
symptoms that can correlate with human depressive symptoms. This study highlights
the stress and non-stress models by distinguishing the merits and demerits of models
used for depression.
Keywords: Anhedonia, Behavioral models, Chronic stress, Depression, Nonbehavioral
models.
