After years of trying to confront the source of my depression, I found out that I inherited incurable bipolar disorder and the only proven effective treatment is drugs. How do you think I should confront that?
No. There are plenty of medications that have measurable effects on average. That doesn't mean it's a one-shot solution for everyone's depression. You need to find the right medication, get therapy, sleep well, and exercise if you have major depressive disorder. But to say that medication has no effect on its own is misleading.
Lamotrigine works for most bipolar people for at least a few years. It's used as a first resort since it has typically no side effects. It quit working for me after four years of use, so I switched to lithium. I don't know much about how lamotrigine affects the mood of normal people, but I do know that if you give lithium to normal people it doesn't affect their psyche in any measurable way.
Respectfully, I think you were playing with fire and got lucky. You have to treat bipolar disorder very differently than unipolar depression. I don't know any doctor who would recommend or even consider using LSD to treat bipolar disorder. Many of the treatments that work for unipolar depression are terrible for bipolar disorder because they can instigate manic or hypomanic phases, if not outright psychosis. I feel happy when reading that you kept bipolar depression at bay (that's really, really good) but I want to caution the readers on this website from using LSD if they have bipolar disorder.
American neighborhoods are typically either like Switzerland or Swaziland. Most neighborhoods have low crime, low gun violence, and high income comparable to Switzerland. The other neighborhoods are comparable to Swaziland in terms of violent crimes. Don't be so quick to call someone's fear irrational if you haven't lived in Swaziland neighborhoods.