Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is an uncommon treatment for severe, chronic depression. It is used sparingly, partially because our understanding of why and how it works is still in the dark ages. It also doesn’t help that it can cause memory loss in many patients who undergo it (usually confined to just memory around ECT treatments, but occasionally also around older, longer-term memories as well), as well as increasing attention and concentration problems in a minority of people who try ECT.

However, a new study sheds light on the possible mechanism for how electroconvulsive therapy works, based upon one theory of how depression works in the brain.

The theory goes like this — depression isn’t caused by too little brain activity. It’s actually caused by too much brain activity, an overactive brain that has accidentally “hot-wired” multiple brain networks together. (How and why this hot-wiring occurs is still a mystery.)

So how can ECT undo this hot-wiring?

In 1920, behaviorist John Watson and his graduate student-turned-wife Rosalie Rayner conducted a conditioning experiment that everyone who’s ever taken an intro psychology course knows all too well: They taught 9-month-old Albert to fear a variety of stimuli that were seemingly innocuous to him from the start.

The most famous example involved a rat. When a rat was first placed alongside Little Albert, he appeared interested and unafraid. When the researchers paired the rat with a loud noise, over time, Albert got scared.

In fact, Albert would start crying at the mere sight of the rat, even though the noise was gone. It turned out that Albert’s newfound fear also extended beyond the rat. He started fearing other furry objects.

Watson used this experiment to substantiate his theory that babies were blank states, and the environment was powerful in influencing them. This experiment was always considered controversial, and many psychologists were curious if Albert’s learned fears continued into adulthood. (That’s because Watson and Rayner never deconditioned him.)

But no one knew Little Albert’s identify or his fate… until a few years ago.

Last week, more than a few news agencies and blogs picked up the story that “one out of every 10 Wall Street employees is a psychopath.” This immediately caught my attention, because as a researcher, I found the statistic intriguing because it was so out of whack with the incidence of psychopathy in the general population.

But in trying to research where this statistic came from, I stumbled upon a symptom of what’s wrong with a lot of journalism today.

I can summarize the problem in one word — laziness. Many (most?) journalists nowadays take “experts” words for whatever claims they make, without ever bothering to check them out independently.

A wealth of psychology research informs us how to increase our well-being and happiness. It’s not doing any single big thing that will increase your happiness, but rather a whole host of small things.

I believe that this remains a key, overlooked point. With all due respect to Bobby McFerrin, you cannot just “be happy” through sheer willpower alone (no more than you can will away depression, ADHD or anxiety). It takes small changes and small efforts — every day — to enable change.

And here’s the kicker for the most effective behavior change march toward happiness — those small, positive behaviors should be incompatible with the unhealthy behaviors you want to change. Psychologists have known for some time that if you have a few bad habits you want to get rid of, you need to replace them with good habits that make continuing with the bad habits virtually impossible.

For lasting behavior change, replace bad habits with good habits that are incompatible with the bad ones.

Let’s look at a few examples to see how this might work in real life.

In A Lethal Inheritance: A Mother Discovers the Science Behind Three Generations of Mental Illness, science journalist Victoria Costello weaves the stories of her family’s mental illness with significant studies on genetics, early intervention and evidence-based treatment.

When Costello’s oldest son is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, she traces her family’s history of mental illness and makes some surprising discoveries — such as her grandfather’s well-guarded suicide.

A Lethal Inheritance is a must-read for anyone who’s been touched by mental illness, especially parents who feel helpless and hopeless. Costello shatters the myth that mental illness is a death sentence, along with countless other misconceptions.

She also recounts how she and her sons coped with their mental illness and achieved full recovery. And she does an excellent job of simplifying complex concepts and informing readers of the newest research.

Although rare, school shootings like the one in Chardon, Ohio capture the horror imagination of every parent and teenager. And many people’s immediate reaction is, “Why would someone do that?”

The alleged shooter, TJ Lane, will now be psychoanalyzed from afar in the media, with various experts throwing in their two cents about his motivations and explaining his actions. Paula Mooney has provided initial fodder, by giving us TJ Lane’s Facebook page. “Experts” will try and piece together a portrait of TJ Lane with these kinds of bits and pieces of random, self-selected personal information.

I’ll try and refrain from any psychological analysis of TJ Lane, since as a professional, I’ve never met him or interviewed him. But I do want to discuss the school shooting in a broader context of whether there are any lessons here we can learn.

Any father can learn to be a better dad. But it takes a commitment — and desire — to focus on one of the more important areas in your life. An involved dad is a better dad — one a child will appreciate not only as a kid, but in fond memories as they progress into adulthood. Children with involved fathers will grow up to be happier, better able to cope with life’s troubles, and healthier than children who have absent or uninvolved dads.

Being a better dad doesn’t mean you have to change who you are, though. It simply means paying attention to the important moments in your child’s life, and being there for both them and the family when needed.

Whether you’re married, divorced, or never married, it’s important to realize that children need both parents involved in their lives. Fathers who spend time with their children increase the chances that their children will succeed in school, have fewer behavior problems, and experience better self-esteem and well-being.

Click through to read the tips to improve your standing as a dad in your children’s life.

Are placebos — sugar pills — just as effective as antidepressant medications in the treatment of mild and moderate depression? That’s what a 60 Minutes piece last night tried to find out.

In discussing her reaction to discovering that the placebo effect may be more powerful than we previously knew in antidepressant research, CBS’s 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl says, “I walked away really confused.”

After viewing her piece, I walked away with the same reaction.

What’s an ordinary person supposed to gain from watching this segment, boiling down decades’ worth of antidepressant research and thousands of studies into less than 20 minutes? I’m not sure.

Writer Jennifer Yane once said, “I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days will attack me at once.” Admittedly, I spend too many days myself running from “the attacks of the calendars.” I am thinking that if I didn’t have so much stress in my life, I might be able to grab a cup of coffee first thing in the morning instead of jot down in my mood journal: how many hours I slept, where I am on my menstrual cycle, my anxiety/depression level upon waking, and any other important notes I need to record for my therapy and doctor’s visits.

It’s an awful lot easier to stay resilient, even if you have a severe mood disorder, when you’re not encased in stress. When you have all that cortisol — the backstabber hormone — mucking around in all of your biological organs, staying sane is about as easy as getting off a chair lift for the first time, or so it feels.

Here are a few steps I’ve been practicing lately to stay resilient in my days and nights loaded with stress.

I grew up in Batavia, N.Y., about ten miles down the road from the small town of LeRoy. I had just gone off to Cornell a few months before the big train derailment in December, 1970, that spilled cyanide crystals and about 30,000 gallons of the solvent called tricholoroethene onto the railroad bed.

I never imagined that 40 years later, as a psychiatrist, I’d be reading about this incident in connection with one of the most mysterious mass outbreaks of neurological symptoms in recent memory. And yet, this past January, the environmental-activist-cum-movie-star, Erin Brockovich, began investigating a possible connection between that chemical spill and the bizarre outbreak among a group of LeRoy Junior-Senior High School students.

I truly don’t know what explains the strange constellation of signs and symptoms seen in this group of young people. I’m not sure anybody does. Most of the expert opinion has settled on the description of “mass psychogenic illness.”

A week ago, an op-ed appeared in the New York Times by L. Alan Sroufe, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development, questioning society’s reliance on medications to help children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). He suggested that Ritalin has “gone wrong,” in that we simply rely too heavily on drugs to treat childhood disorders.

He starts off the op-ed, “As a psychologist who has been studying the development of troubled children for more than 40 years, I believe we should be asking why we rely so heavily on these drugs.”

Like most professionals who are trying to boil down decades worth of research into a layperson-friendly length, Dr. Sroufe unfortunately glosses over the psychological literature and what we know (and don’t know) about ADHD medications.

I will say this before we begin… most children would benefit not just from being prescribed an ADHD medication, but also getting specific psychological treatment as well. Few child psychologists and child specialists would be happy if their patients were only getting the benefits of one type of treatment, and many would agree that parents are too quick to medicate before trying non-medication options.

If you sprinkle a hefty dose of Catholic (or Jewish) guilt unto a fragile biochemistry headed toward a severe mood disorder, you usually arrive at some kind of a religious nut. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! For I am one.

I have said many places that growing up Catholic, for me, was both a blessing and a curse.

A blessing in that my faith became a refuge for me, a retreat (no pun intended) where my disordered thinking could latch unto practices and traditions that made me feel normal. Catholicism, with all of its rituals and faith objects, provided me a safe place to go for comfort and consolation, to hear I wasn’t alone, and that I would be taken care of. It was, and has been throughout my life, a source of hope. And any speck of hope is what keeps me alive when I am suicidal.

But my fervent faith was also a curse in that, with all of its stuff (medals, rosaries, icons, statues), it dressed and disguised my illness as piety. So instead of taking me to the school psychologist or to a mental health professional, the adults in my life considered me a very holy child, a religious prodigy with a curiously intense faith.