People often use beaches for recreation. They swim, bask in the sun, or just relax. The most popular beaches have fine white or light-colored sand and warm water to swim in. Beaches are also used for diving or for seeing marine life.
Among the world's most popular and well-known beaches are Aruba (Dutch Caribbean), Long Beach (Canada), Copacabana Beach (Brazil), Hot Water Beach (New Zealand), Megan Bay (St. Thomas), Kailua Beach (Hawaii), Zandvoort Beach (Netherlands), Jeffreys Bay (South Africa) and Bondi Beach (Australia).
Taking holidays on the beach is something of a British cultural export. Early railways in the 19th century took people to places they had never seen before. This tourism was made possible by the industrial revolution. Whole seaside resort towns grew to support visitors, where before there were just villages. Vacations at the sea became common all over the world.
Beaches are never static. They are always being built up or eroded, more quickly than other landforms. Over time the boundary between the land and the sea changes. New Romney, a small town in Kent, is one of the Cinque Ports, a mile from the sea. In Henry VIII's time it was a port on the south coast of England. The growth of Dungeness has cut it off from the sea. Dungeness is a huge shingle beach.
Mental illness
A mental illness is an illness of the mind. People with a mental illness may behave in strange ways or have strange thoughts in their view or the view of others. Mental illnesses can affect the day to day functioning of a person.
Mental illnesses develop during the life of a person. This may be linked to genes and experience. What is considered as a mental illness has changed over time. What is considered to be a mental illness may not be one in a different culture. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) by the American Psychiatric Association is used around the world.
People with a mental illness sometimes have problems dealing with other people, or struggle with daily functioning. Treatment and certain medications can help people with daily functioning.
In some cases, mental illnesses change the way the brain works. Many conditions which affect the brain are not mental illnesses, as they do not change the way in which people think: Neither epilepsy nor Parkinson's disease is a mental illness, yet both affect the brain.
According to the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health in the United States, the most common type of disability in the United States is major mental illnesses (which include major depression, bipolar disorder, personality disorders, body dysmorphic disorder, schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder).
Thirty-three percent of North American adults will have a mental illness in a given year, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. But in more than half of these cases, the mental illness is not bad enough to disrupt daily life activities.
There is a genetic basis which makes some people more likely to develop mental illness. A study published in "The Lancet", a medical journal, found the same set of genetic markers in people with five different disorders: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, major depression, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Mental illnesses can be treated by:
Some more controversial treatments include
Many counties have laws that permit to treat people against their will.
Even though the media show this differently, studies have shown that people with a severe mental illness are not necessarily violent. Statistically, violence is often caused by factors such as drug abuse, or those related to the personal, social and economic situation.
Findings show that people with a mental illness that live in the community will be victims of violence more often that they will be those starting or spreading it. A study that looked at people diagnosed with "severe mental illness" living in a US inner-city area found that a quarter of them had been victims of at least one violent crime over the course of a year; this proportion was eleven times higher than the average. For people which have been diagnosed with a mental illness it is more difficult to get a trial started, because fewer people believe them, and many people have a prejudice against people with a mental illness.
There are a few specific diagnoses which are defined by conduct problems and violence. These include conditions such as childhood conduct disorder, adult antisocial personality disorder or psychopathy. There are conflicting findings about how much specific symptoms are linked to an increase in violent behaviour. These symptoms include psychosis (hallucinations or delusions) that can occur in disorders such as schizophrenia, delusional disorder or mood disorder. The factors that lead to violent behaviour are more often demographic or economic in nature, such as being young, male, of lower socioeconomic status or of abusing drugs, including alcoholism, to which some people are particularly vulnerable.
Some studies show that disabled people are sometimes treated badly. For example, people with mental illness may deal with ableism. An example of ableism is insults, for example calling a mentally ill person a "retard".
High-profile cases have led to fears that serious crimes, such as homicide, have increased because people with certain mental illnesses are not treated in specialized institutions, but the evidence does not support this conclusion. Violence that does occur in relation to mental disorder (against the mentally ill or by the mentally ill) typically occurs in the context of complex social interactions, often in a family setting rather than between strangers. It is also an issue in health care settings and the wider community.
Depression (mental illness)
Depression (also called major depressive disorder, unipolar depression or clinical depression) is a mental illness. Many people think that depression just means a person is very sad. However, depression can cause many symptoms in the body as well as mood problems.
The ICD-10 is used around the world to diagnose people with illnesses like depression. According to the ICD-10, for a person to be diagnosed with depression, their symptoms have to last for at least two weeks. The symptoms must happen every day, or almost every day. These symptoms also have to cause problems in a person's life (like their work life, family life, social life, or other important parts of their life).
Usually, for depression to be diagnosed, a person must have five or more of these symptoms:
Most people who have not had depression do not completely understand its effects. Instead, they see it as simply being sad. Since it is not understood, many people criticize people with depression for not helping themselves.
Some people with depression die by suicide. Depression is one of the mental illnesses that can cause a person to have suicidal thoughts.
It is impossible to get an exact number of how many people have depression. There are many reasons for this. For example:
Major depression is one of the most common mental illnesses in the United States. In 2014, 15.7 million adults in the United States had at least one episode of major depression. This is about 6.7% of all adults in the United States.
Around the world, depression causes more disability than any other mental health or behavioral illness, according to the World Health Organization.
However, the prevalence of depression is different in different cultures and countries.