For nearly two centuries, clinicians have noticed that the body moves differently when the mind is in distress — a tremor, a slowness, an involuntary jerk. New research from Northwestern University now begins to chart what those movements mean: motor abnormalities appear to function both as broad warnings of psychological vulnerability and as more specific signals pointing toward particular disorders. The finding suggests that the body's language of distress is neither random nor perfectly precise, but layered — much like the illnesses it may foreshadow.