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My ideas for this book have been evolving over the last several
years as I have been working in the animal modeling area and have
seen it change rather dramatically. There have been tremendous
advances, both in methodology and in conceptualization, yet the
literature is scattered in journals encompassing many disciplines.
In particular, there have been only very limited attempts to write
about the philosophical, conceptual, and controversial issues in
this field; to pull together diverse findings; and to provide some
general perspective on its future. As will probably be apparent, I
am a clinical psychiatrist who also has a fundamental interest in
animal behavior, especially primate social behavior. I entered the
field from a clinical research standpoint to devel op some animal
models of depression after being stimulated to do so by Dr. William
Bunney, then at the National Institute of Mental Health and now at
the University of California-Irvine. The field has grown rapidly
since then and there is considerable research activity. Indeed, the
re search activity has grown more rapidly than our
conceptualization of what animal models are and are not. Animal
preparations are now available for studying specific aspects of
certain types of psychopathology. Thoughtful workers in the animal
modeling field no longer talk about comprehensive models but rather
about more limited experimental preparations in animals for
studying certain specific aspects of human psychopathology."
In this book we present a conceptually integrated approach to
disorders of mood. These disorders are defined narrowly as the
clinical syndromes of mania and melancholia. The latter is our
particular focus, for the simple reason that it is more common and
thus more is known about it. Our approach owes much to Adolf Meyer,
who first used the term psychobiology. It was he who emphasized in
a practical way the importance of the clinician consider ing the
joint contribution of psychosocial and biological factors in the
genesis of mental disorders. However, until the 1960s, our relative
ignorance of basic mechanisms that link brain and behavior
prevented the development of a genuine psychobiological
perspective. Thus Meyer's work was concerned largely with teaching
the importance of the personal biography and a consideration of
social history in the development of mental disorder. We feel that
sufficiently rigorous data have now emerged in psychia try to
permit tentative but real psychobiological integration. Affective
illness is proba bly the most promising area for an attempt at such
a synthesis. It is our belief that the theory and clinical practice
of psychiatry now can be woven into a coherent theme, integrating
insights and evidence generated by the psychodynamic, biological,
and behavioral methods; hence in part we review the emerging
psychobiology of mood disorders with the hope that it can serve as
a generic paradigm for other psychiatric syndromes."
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