And so back to the original question, can you give someone mental illness with one word? The answer appears to be yes. If models of the mind are memes, and if culture is just a collection of memes, we should be thinking hard about whether the way we think and talk about mental health can itself be part of the problem.

Exposure to the actual idea that "sometimes people get really unhappy and they are motivated to kill themselves — and that could happen to you," seems like a much bigger deal than learning the word.

Similarly in PTSD, It's not just reliving the trauma that unlearns the ptsd, it's reactivating the trauma response while also activating a contradictory experience. Your brain detects the mismatch and then updates the old response. Unfortunately the memory is often overwhelming, which inhibits the updating. Hence MDMA-therapy, which make the process comfortable enough for the updating to happen, and it also provides a built in contradictory experience.