Depression is a common mental illness, and affects peo ple in different color, race, gender, age, or economic status.Pre vention and cure of depression has been attached much worldwide importance.In order to look for more effective antidepressants, the development of safe and effective antidepressants from traditional Chinese herbs has become the currently researching hotspots.Through consulting the significant relevant papers, we summarized the research development of antidepressant traditional Chinese medi cine, including the following aspects: the active constituents, the extracts, and the compound Chinese medicine of nature medicine.Animal models have been proved important to recent advances in experimental neuroscience, they represent the tool to define poten tial antidepressant activity of drugs by far.In this paper, we de scribed respective characters of currently available animal models,which were compared with clinical efficacy to evaluate the concord ance, weak links and clinical values, advanced the suggestions of development of depressant animal models.