I had my first (and so far only) ecstasy pill a year or so ago, and it was wonderful - lit my brain on fire, caused me to experience the best music festival I've ever been to, and gave me the kind of intense connection with my friends I'd been missing from years of crippling depression. The following week was hell, and caused slight but permanent damage to my family relationships. It took a couple more weeks to recover to even my low standard of 'normal'.
It was only later that I learned that ecstasy, amphetamines, LSD, and basically anything that acts on the seratonin system can cause severe depression lasting a week or more - and if you've already got depression, that can get really bad.
It's worth being careful with these things.
On the other hand - a similar experiment a couple of months later with a small dose of synthetic psilocybin yielded a week of the best mood I've been in for years, with no obvious side effects.
I'd love to see more research on these things. I'm probably not going to do much more research on it using my own brain ;)
At the same time, I have mixed feelings about psychiatry. The field has done a lot of good, but I also can't help but feel that modern antidepressants are seriously lacking. They help some people, but they don't help everyone and can take weeks or months to work; they can also backfire and make some people suicidal. Prior to the 1950s, the common antidepressants were opiates and amphetamines. These fell out of favor due to their addictive properties, but in a way their addictiveness comes from how effective they are at rapidly alleviating depression. If you found a pill that made you happy within an hour, it's easy to see why you would want to keep taking it (and why you might want to take more of it than you need).
It can be very difficult to create an antidepressant that makes you feel better without also having addictive qualities. I often wonder if stigmatizing opiates and amphetamines -- and replacing them with MAOIs, tricyclics, and SSRI/SNRIs -- was a mistake. I'm not saying that they should be first-line treatments, but it seems a little weird that we would rather give people ECT (induced seizures) than psychoactive chemicals that reliably and rapidly alleviate dysphoria.
I've personally found Kratom (a plant with opioid alkaloids) to be very effective at relieving depression and anxiety, and of course states have already moved to ban it. Sometimes it feels like all the useful drugs are illegal, and we're left with these half-assed pharmaceuticals that have a low potential for abuse precisely because they don't do anything useful.
Again, I think psychiatry has done a lot of good, and many medications do help people. But desperate individuals are still committing suicide. We need to do better.