If someone has committed a crime, another person might blackmail them. The blackmailer might, for example, say that if the criminal does not give them a large amount of money, they will tell the police.
A blackmailer may threaten to say something embarrassing that someone unless they hand over a sum of money. For example, it maybe something about an intimacy that they are having that they do not want everyone to know about.
Sometimes, a business may blackmail another business. They might threaten to harm that business in some way unless money is paid.
Blackmail is against the law. People who are caught blackmailing may be sent to jail.
Blackmail started on the borders of England and Scotland. Blackmail was the money left out by landowners in England so that raiders from Scotland did not steal their animals or damage the property.
Bribery
Bribery means offering something (such as money) to a person in return for some favour which is bad in some way.
The money that is offered is called a bribe, and the verb is to bribe. Active bribery is offering payment and asking for favour, and passive bribery is asking for payment and offering favour. It is still called bribery if the trade is never done.
It is sometimes difficult to decide whether something is a bribe or just a reward. If a father pays his son for washing the car, that is just a reward or payment. However, if a parent pays a child for eating up its dinner, that might be thought of as a bribe because most people would think that is not right.
Bribery can be a crime in more serious cases, such as when a person offers money to hide their own wrongdoing. If a motorist is caught speeding by a policeman and offers the policeman money or a bottle of vodka to persuade him not to report him, that is bribery. If someone wants to take something into a country that is forbidden (or that they would have to pay tax on), they might offer the customs officer a bribe to persuade him to let them through. Some corrupt people will not do their jobs at all (like delivering some package) unless they get a bribe on top of their normal pay.
Those examples are clearly illegal (against the law) and are rare in many countries, but bribery is quite common in business in many parts of the world. It is difficult to do anything without offering bribes in these places. Giving business people presents in the hope that they will want to do business with you may just seem like good manners at times, but in some cases, it may seem more like bribery.
People who are found to be taking bribes can sometimes lose their jobs. In some cases (like the case of the motorist), bribery is against the law.
Rubella
Rubella (also known as German measles) is a disease caused by the Rubella virus.
It is often mild and an attack can pass unnoticed. However, this can make the virus very difficult to diagnose.
The disease can last 1–5 days. Children recover more quickly than adults.
The virus usually enters the body through the nose or throat. Like most viruses living along the respiratory tract, it is passed from person to person by tiny droplets in the air that are breathed out.
Rubella can also be transmitted from a mother to her developing baby (fetus) through the placenta. This can be very dangerous to the fetus, especially if the mother gets rubella early on in her pregnancy. Rubella can cause deafness, heart problems, intellectual disability, and many other problems in developing fetuses.
The virus has an incubation period of 2 to 3 weeks during which it becomes established. Common symptoms are a red/pink rash, swollen lymph nodes, and a high fever.
The disease is named "German measles" because it has a similar red rash to measles and was first described in detail by German doctors.
On April 29, 2015, it was announced that rubella has been eliminated in North American and South America. A scientific group of experts said it took 15 years of work for this to happen. Among the groups are: Pan American Health Organization, United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, UNICEF, and the United Nations Foundation.
Psychiatry
Psychiatry is a part of medicine that studies, diagnoses and treats mental illnesses and abnormal behaviours and conditions that cause problems and make life difficult for people. The people who practice psychiatry and treat others who have psychiatric problems are called "psychiatrists".
Psychiatrists are medically qualified doctors. They can legally prescribe medications to their patients to help emotional and behavioral problems. This does not apply to psychologists, who are not qualified to prescribe medicines.
Psychiatrists learn about how the body and the brain work. Psychiatrists must learn about all kinds of illnesses. Sometimes a disease in the body causes the brain to work poorly. Cancer in the pancreas causes depression. Blood sugar problems in diabetes mellitus can cause a bad temper. These are only two examples.
As doctors, psychiatrists learn about how medications can help the brain work better. They also learn how medications sometimes cause problems to the brain. Sometimes psychologists send their patients to a psychiatrist if the patient seems to have a problem that medicine might help. The patient should continue to see the psychologist.
In the 1950s, the first medicine to help patients with bipolar disorder (formally known as manic-depressive illness) was discovered. This was lithium, a type of metal in a powder form. A bit later, the first medicine for psychosis was discovered. Later, medicines to calm people (tranquilizers), to end depression (anti-depressants), to help feelings remain the same each day (mood stabilizers) were discovered.
Medicine for mental illness does not cure. Some of the medicines try to get brain chemicals to be the amounts they are in normal people. Other medicines "slow down how fast the brain works" so people with rapid thoughts can be in control of what they think and how they behave. When the medicines are stopped, symptoms often come back.
The best known psychiatrist is Sigmund Freud, a medical doctor who was trained in neurology. He became certain that hidden thoughts in the brain (which he called the unconscious) could cause physical symptoms and strange behavior in some people. He believed that human behavior was not all caused by the brain, but by things that happened to people when they were babies and young children. His research of this theory – the idea he had – led him to create "talking therapy" – psychoanalysis – where he tried to figure out what could cause the mind to do things like this.
He thought that his figuring things out and telling the patients what had caused the behavior would cure the patient. Unfortunately, it usually made no lasting changes. This is why psychiatrists (and psychologists) have gradually figured out many other ways of helping their patients.
Since the medications for mental illness were first discovered, there have been tools to understand why the mentally ill behave and think in ways that make it not easy for them to live. Doctors do this by studying the brain as directly as they can.
This field of medicine is called neuropsychiatry. The medical doctors who work in the field are called neuropsychiatrists. They hope someday to really permanently cure or fix mental illness by finding ways to change the brain forever. In the meantime, they try to find ways to help by finding better medications.
The science of psychology is studies the way people behave and change. Psychologists apply this what is found to make new ways of helping people change how they behave. Talking therapy and applied psychology were the first important ways of helping people with some problems of regular life. Some kinds of mental illness can be helped some this way, but some kinds cannot be helped. They need medicines instead, then sometimes a psychologist can help the patient a great deal.