A simple, rapid, selective and highly sensitive spectrophotometric method is described for the quantitative determination of the tricyclic antidepressant drugs, desipramine hydrochloride (DPH), clomipramine hydrochloride (CPH) and imipramine hydrochloride (IMH) in pure and in pharmaceutical preparations. The proposed method is based on the bromination of above drugs with known excess of bromine. The unreacted bromine is determined based on its ability to bleach the dye Eiochrome blue black R quantitatively at 530 nm for all the three drugs obeying Beer's law in the range, 0.0 -8, 0.0 -10 and 0.0 -9.0 mu g ml(-1) for DPH, CPH and IMH, respectively. The molar absorptivity values were found to be 1.61 x 104, 1.62 x 10(4) and1.57 x 10(4) l mol(-1)cm(-1), respectively with the corresponding Sandell's sensitivity values 0.0187, 0.0216 and 0.0202 mu g cm(-2). The limits of detection and (LOD) and quantification (LOQ) are also reported for the developed method. Intra-and inter-day precision and accuracy of the method were established according to the current ICH guidelines. Applications of the procedure to the analysis of various pharmaceutical preparations gave reproducible and accurate results. Further, the validity of the procedure was confirmed by applying the standard addition technique and the results were evaluated in terms of Student's t-test and variance ratio F-test to find out the significance of proposed method over the reference method.