Abstract
Animal models of depression are problematic and results drawn from them is moderately convincing. The main problem, it is often argued, is that it is impossible to model a mental disorder, i.e. specifically human, in animals like rodents: it is a matter of resemblance of symptoms. Yet in this field it is generally assumed that animal models of depression are more or less ‘valid’ according to three criteria: predictive, construct, and face validity, with only the latter concerned with the resemblance of symptoms. It is argued here that the problem is actually not with resemblance to the clinical features or to the factors of depression: it is not their being mental parameters. It lies, rather, in the fuzziness of the definition of a human entity and in the difficulty of linking together supposedly involved biological mechanisms into a consistent picture of the underlying process of the disease. It is therefore not that we cannot model what we know to be depression, it is rather that we do not know what to model.
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Notes
- 1.
Other definitions have been proposed (see McArthur and Borsini 2008, xix).
- 2.
Steel also refers to another facilitating condition, namely, that the inference is about negative or positive causal relevance only, not on the effect size. Thereby, a certain degree of dissimilarity in corresponding stages of the mechanism does not affect the soundness of the extrapolation. This obviously applies to the problem of metabolism referred to above in the case of modeling depression .
- 3.
As neurobiologist Catherine Belzung explained to me (personal communication).
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Acknowledgments
Professors C. Belzung, neurobiologist, and V. Camus, psychiatrist, have read and discussed the paper. Thanks to them for having always been an invaluable help since the beginning of my philosophical work in their team.
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Lemoine, M. (2016). Extrapolation from Animal Model of Depressive Disorders: What’s Lost in Translation?. In: Wakefield, J., Demazeux, S. (eds) Sadness or Depression?. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7423-9_11
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