The Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN) is investing in closer collaboration with the field of psychiatry over the coming years. Through a dedicated grant programme, the institute is supporting joint research projects that bring together fundamental neuroscience and clinical psychiatry. The aim is to improve the understanding of how changes in the brain give rise to psychiatric disorders, paving the way for better diagnosis and treatment.
Psychiatric disorders—including depression, anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and schizophrenia—are among the leading causes of reduced well-being and societal burden worldwide. Yet diagnoses are still largely based on clinical interviews and behavioural observations. Reliable biological markers (biomarkers) are often lacking, making it difficult to establish accurate diagnoses or predict which treatment is most likely to be effective. Advances in research technologies now enable scientists to study brain cells and neural circuits with unprecedented precision. These developments are helping researchers unravel the biological mechanisms underlying psychiatric symptoms, creating opportunities for more objective diagnostics, more targeted treatments, and ultimately a better quality of life for people living with psychiatric disorders.
Investing in collaborative research
To accelerate progress in this field, the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience has launched a new grant programme. The programme will fund two collaborative research projects that bring together neuroscientists and psychiatrists to combine their expertise. An important objective is to train early-career psychiatrists in fundamental neuroscience while also giving neuroscientists greater exposure to clinical psychiatric research.
Why do some people struggle to recover from depression?
One of these grants is awarded to clinical neuropsychologist Esmée Verwijk (Amsterdam UMC), psychiatrists Didi Rhebergen (GGZ centraal) and Jeanine Kamphuis (UMCG), for their project ‘Why do some people struggle to recover from depression?’.
Depression is more than just feeling sad. Many people with depression experience sleep problems and difficulties with concentration, planning or remembering, sometimes even after treatment. These symptoms make it harder to resume everyday life. In addition, depression treatments are often less effective for these individuals, or their depression returns more quickly. Yet we still do not fully understand why sleep problems and cognitive difficulties are so closely linked, or why some people with depression experience these problems much more severely than others.
These initiators are working together with researchers from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience on a groundbreaking new research idea. A project group of ten additional clinicians and neuroscientists from across the Netherlands is contributing to the project. Their shared goal is to better understand what happens in the brain of people with depression who experience sleep and cognitive problems. This could be an important step towards entirely new treatment approaches.
“We know that cognitive complaints and sleep problems are associated with poorer recovery, but we still do not understand why one patient is severely affected while another experiences hardly any of these problems,” says Esmée Verwijk. “That is exactly the question we hope to answer with this research.”