Opening film · Translational Neuropsychiatry Unit

Underneath the list

Depression is diagnosed from a list of nine symptoms, and you need any five of them. That makes 227 different ways to have the same diagnosis — two people can share it, and just one symptom. Look underneath the list and it comes apart: in about one in four the immune system is running hot, and in others brain scans show distinct circuit types. The same symptoms, different biology, and so no single treatment fits everyone.

To untangle it you have to follow one illness through every level — genes, molecules, synapses, circuits, the immune system, memory, behaviour, blood — in animal models and in people, and back again. No single instrument, and no single lab, can see all of it. That is the argument for a unit of nine research groups.

A prototype. It opens the unit's film; the sections on the nine individual research groups are still being made with them.

1:38 · 16:9 · narrated · prototype v0.1

Made in the Landau Lab for the Translational Neuropsychiatry Unit, Aarhus University, November 2026.

What is on screen

Sources

This film is released under CC BY-SA 4.0, not the CC BY that covers the rest of this site. Several sources in it carry a ShareAlike condition — the HCP-1065 white-matter atlas, two Wikimedia photographs and one instrument card — and on a strict reading that condition passes to the finished film. You may re-cut and redistribute it, with credit, under the same licence.
No image in the film is AI-generated. Everything that looks like data is real data. The glass, light, camera moves and type are designed, and where a layout or a count is illustrative the full credits say so. The narration voice is synthetic and the music was generated.
Human cortical pyramidal neurons — 14 reconstructions from the Allen Cell Types Database (Allen Institute for Brain Science) via NeuroMorpho.Org, CC BY 4.0. Berg et al. 2021, Nature 598:151; Ascoli et al. 2007, J Neurosci 27:9247.
White-matter tracts — HCP-1065 population tractography atlas (Yeh 2022, Nat Commun 13:4933), CC BY-SA 4.0, derived from Human Connectome Project data, WU-Minn Consortium.
Live microglia — Gu et al. 2023, eLife 12:RP86749, CC BY 4.0. Inflammation in depression — Osimo et al. 2019, Psychological Medicine 49:1958, CC BY 4.0. Circuit biotypes — Tozzi et al. 2024, Nature Medicine 30:2076, CC BY 4.0.
Behaviour — tracked with CoTracker3 (Meta AI, CC BY-NC 4.0); footage from Klibaite et al. 2025, TRIADS, Harvard Dataverse, doi:10.7910/DVN/CYDZ2F, CC0 1.0.
The 227 combinations on screen were computed here from DSM-5 criterion A, and the symptom-profile chart is our own re-plot of the published numbers in Fried & Nesse 2015, J Affect Disord 172:96 — not a reproduction of their figure.
The complete list of sources, segment by segment with a licence for every item