<title>Abstract</title>
Major depressive disorder is a common psychiatric condition that is often resistant to medication. The Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) rat has been suggested as an animal model of endogenous depression; however, it is challenging to translate results obtained in animal models into humans. Solitary housing is a mild stress paradigm that could simulate the environment of depressive patients with limited social activity due to symptoms. We used voxel-based morphometry to directly compare the solitary-housed WKY rat model with data from previous human studies, and validated our results with behavioural studies and correlation analyses. Atrophy in WKY rats was detected in the ventral hippocampus, caudate putamen, lateral septum, cerebellar vermis, and cerebellar nuclei (<italic>p</italic> &lt; 0.05, corrected for family-wise error rate). Further, locomotor behaviour was negatively correlated with hippocampal atrophy and positively correlated with atrophy of the cerebellar vermis. The regions of brain atrophy validate WKY rats as an animal model for endogenous depression and can aid the translation of study results to humans. Our study also reveals the possibility of a cerebellar contribution to depression.