Good luck with the dream career. The job market is supposed to easing but things still seem pretty tough to me. You don't say whether you are receiving any treatment for depression. It might be worth thinking about if things are bad enough to merit that. If you are at university you might have a student counselling centre, quite a lot do.
I think you are wise to avoid MDMA. When Raves and MDMA hit the UK in quantity I was teaching a 25 strong A Level Psychology group. A lot of my students took to MDMA, well over half of them. To me 3 of them were adversly affected in depression related ways. I had been teaching one girl for 3 years and she'd never shown any signs of depression. She took MDMA and only a few days later was hit by a really bad depression. It put her in hospital for a while. I had two guys who were heavily in to all sorts of stuff, they kept trying to convince me that candyflipping was the way forward for me. They both developed moderate depressions. They stopped looking after themselves, they lost interest in everything except MDMA, their mood was low most of the time and their abilities as students took a nose dive. One of them needed antidepressants. I think that is quite a lot of depression when you are thinking of 12-3 people. The clincher for me was when the godfather of MDMA, Sasha Shulgin, wrote that he thought it was prudent to be sparing in how often you took MDMA. MDMA and depression don't really mix for me.
Anyway I wish you well. Maybe we'll talk again.
Love
Steve