Talk:Behavioural despair test

September 2007
There is a flaw in the logic of this test, which extended to the human experience, has a negative social impact when medications which pass this test are introduced into society.

Traditionally, antidepressants were not indicated for 'situational depression', but were used to treat people who had depression from internal biochemical causes.

This test imposes a negative circumstance to an individual, and proposes a chemical solution that makes the individual accepting of the circumstance. This type of chemical solution, if perfected can make a whole class of 'worker bees' accepting of oppressive conditions. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.114.163.55 (talk) 08:56, 5 September 2007 (UTC)


 * This test is actually critisised within the neuroscience community as well. There are confounding factors in the test including that it may be a test of stress induced learning rather than behavioural despair and that water temperature has a huge impact on the results, suggesting that animals may swim to keep warm rather than because they aren't despairing. Your criticism seems to be because you are fundamentally opposed to the use of antidepressents though, and not a critique of the method itself. Most antidepressants actually increase levels of motor activity in general in rodents anyway, so it may be that this stimulent effect is more important than anti-depressant activity.Povmcdov 12:54, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Behavioural despair includes a whole bunch of other tests including tail suspension test and (to a degree) learnt helplessness. The forced swim test is really only one test for behavioural despair, and really deserves its own page esp given its many factors, eg size of cylinder, temp of water etc. And re: the validity of the forced swim test, there are many MANY articles within both psyc and neurosci journals about its validity. i would recommend people interested in this to look a few of them up.--124.170.131.195 18:12, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Drown
From the article: ''The time that the test animal spends without moving in the second trial is measured. This immobility time is decreased by antidepressants.''

So the animal drowns, dies, resurrects from the dead, decides to go for a dive without a breath for a period of maybe ten minutes? --Abdull (talk) 22:41, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Unlikely. Animals don't drown unless something goes wrong, in which case a technician should be keeping watch. If they do, it obviously doesn't count. Nervous neuron (talk) 03:45, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

Supposed "hope experiment"
There's a story going round about an experiment supposedly carried out by Curt Richter in the 50s, very similar to this one, but apparently finding rats to swim for much longer for the second time around, interpreted to show the "power of hope" or something like that. One easily finds several accounts of this one on the internet by just searching for "hope experiment", but so far, I couldn't find a source that seems trustworthy. Seems to me it could be an urban legend inspired by this here real experiment. Mike F (talk) 08:48, 17 October 2022 (UTC)