I too have treated MDD with psychedelics along side CBT therapy (not in official conjunction) and found that my suicidal ideation and anhedonia subsided for about a year after my first big trip. Since then, I've done heroic doses and microdoses and found that the most beneficial to me was infrequent large doses combined with integration in therapy afterwards. I agree with your take that it's more akin to a "shock therapy" than a regular medication.
I'm curious, do you work with a talk therapist? If so, do you feel like the therapy + psychedelics is better than either alone?
I have had limited opportunities to have ongoing talk therapy, but I've done a lot of the heavy lifting of CBT on my own throughout the years (both during psychedelic trips and in my day-to-day life).
For me the psychedelic trips have been an opportunity to focus on a subset of CBT (challenging negative thoughts + behavioural activation), while in the day-to-day CBT I've focused more on keeping in mind the cognitive-behavioural model as well as an index of cognitive distortions to test my flowing thoughts against. It's a bit challenging to try to hold on to your flowing thoughts when under the influence of noticeable doses of psychedelics, and that's why I focused more on specific points of trauma as well as noticeable reactions (literally looking at my face in the mirror at times). I've personally noticed two different moments post-trip: the first few hours to days where clarity of mind is much higher than my baseline and I can transform the work of the trip into something tangible in the long run (like a commitment to the gym), and the next few weeks where I sense an initially sharp and then gradual fading out of any "afterglow" from the trip, which is why I've come to see those trips as shock therapy even when I can extract something positive beyond the horizon of time of that "afterglow". I've also noticed that this whole system worked less and less well with the years, the window of time going from months to weeks to days, even as I spaced apart the psychedelic trips more and more (1/month -> 3-4/year -> 1/year or less).
I used to be a bit wary of inherent bias from researchers all too eager to share positive things with the world, but with the widening of the Overton window regarding psychedelics and the success of the cannabis market in many places in the world I've also started to be wary of financial interests in the subject. Nonetheless, I'm really looking forward to the new research coming out around psychedelics because there's just so much that we don't actually know properly with science to back it up - and more teams to work on the subject will offer more chances to figure out what's going on within that expansive world.
I'm curious, do you work with a talk therapist? If so, do you feel like the therapy + psychedelics is better than either alone?