'Almost nothing is firmly established': A History of Heredity and Genetics in Mental Health Science.

Background: For more than a century, scientists have tried to find the key to causation of mental ill health in heredity and genetics. The difficulty of finding clear and actionable answers in our genes has not stopped them looking. This history offers important context to understanding mental health science today.

Ambition, 'failure' and the laboratory: Birmingham as a centre of twentieth-century British scientific psychiatry.

This article will reveal how local scientific determination and ambition, in the face of rejection by funders, navigated a path to success and to influence in national policy and international medicine. It will demonstrate that Birmingham, England's 'second city', was the key centre for cutting-edge biological psychiatry in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. The ambitions of Frederick Mott - doyen of biochemistry, neuropathology and neuropsychiatry, until now celebrated as a London figure - to revolutionize psychiatric treatment through science, chimed with those of the City and University of Birmingham's Joint Board of Research for Mental Diseases.

Introduction: historical contexts to communicating mental health.

Contemporary discussions around language, stigma and care in mental health, the messages these elements transmit, and the means through which they have been conveyed, have a long and deep lineage. Recognition and exploration of this lineage can inform how we communicate about mental health going forward, as reflected by the 9 papers which make up this special issue. Our introduction provides some framework for the history of communicating mental health over the past 300 years.

'Good in all respects': appearance and dress at Staffordshire County Lunatic Asylum, 1818-54.

Dress was integral to the ideals and practice of Staffordshire County Lunatic Asylum, an institution catering for all social classes. Lunatics' appearance was used to gauge the standard of care inside the asylum and beyond. Clothing was essential for moral treatment and physical health.