Depression is a common mental illness, which is mainly manifested as low mood, decreased interest, unresponsiveness, poor diet and sleep, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors can occur in severe cases. Traditional Chinese medicine believes that depression involves many factors such as seven emotions depression, visceral dysfunction, qi, blood and body fluid imbalance, yin and yang, cold and heat imbalance, and other factors. There are different understandings of depression syndromes and pathogenesis, but as the same disease, depression also has common diseases Based on the theory that “Yang is active” and “Shenyang is the root of Yuanyang” put forward by The Book of Changes, it is believed that depression is empirical, taking kidney-yang depression as a common feature. In recent years, TCM clinical diagnosis and treatment of depression has gradually begun to pay attention It warms and invigorates the kidney-yang, and has achieved good results. Clinical practice has found that Xiaoyaosan plus a medicine for warming kidney-yang has a stronger antidepressant effect than Xiaoyaosan alone or other drug groups that are compatible with tranquilizing, promoting blood circulation and reducing phlegm. Jiaotai Pills treat menopausal depression With satisfactory results, Li, a well-known Chinese medicine practitioner in Shanxi Province, can treat more than 100 cases of depression with Sini Decoction. A large number of animal experiments from the perspective of "drug testing" have found that medicines for warming kidney yang can effectively improve the depression state of model animals, and provide supporting evidence for the argument that insufficient kidney yang is the underlying pathogenesis of depression. The glucocorticoid-induced kidney-yang deficiency depression animal model is widely used. The glucocorticoid drug modeling is a new and effective animal model of depression. Intake of a certain amount of exogenous glucocorticoid can make the pituitary gland The release of ACTH in leaves is reduced, and animals have a series of "exhaustion" phenomena, which are very similar to the clinical manifestations of Yang deficiency syndrome. However, the main problems in animal modeling at present are that there are large differences in drug types, administration routes, dosages, modeling time and evaluation indicators, and the lack of uniformity and standardization has brought certain difficulties to experimental and clinical research. . This article uses Web of Science, PubMed biomedicine, EBSCO + MED-LINE database corresponding journal websites to download the full text, China Knowledge Network, Wanfang data knowledge service platform, mainly collected about 90 articles about depression, depression, In the literature of kidney-yang deficiency and kidney-yang deficiency depression, a comparative analysis of the corticosterone model and the hydrocortisone model, which are currently used frequently, provides a reference for formulating standardized and unified modeling methods and evaluation indicators.