The current canon of legal psychiatric drugs won't ever cure the underlying issue that causes the symptoms.
The only things that come close to that are the psychedelics -- psilocybin, MDMA, LSD, etc. They have been outlawed but of course, the underground therapy community has been keeping them alive and we should see legalization for the treatment of things like PTSD within the next 5 years.
They talk about these uses on almost every episode of the Joe Rogan Experience. He has a lot of researchers on who describe their usage of psychedelics to treat depression in particular. They describe it as "brain reset" or more like a chance for people to stick their head out of the fog, giving them the opportunity to see how they're stuck in a negative cycle. I just wonder if it's like a Tony Robbins seminar, super motivating and informative, but with little hope for long-term effects unless you keep going to seminars or eating mushrooms. Is there no hope of genuine change in your thought patterns outside of long-term psychoanalysis or a spiritual awakening of some type?
The problem with "curing depression" as a whole is that it's a complex syndrome with multiple causes, and our understanding of the brain is very primitive at this point.
I kind of think that many recreational psychedelics are both over-hyped by advocates and over-demonized by naysayers. Recreational experiences are fine and dandy, but I haven't seen much evidence so far that serotonergics do anything for depression. MDMA for PTSD remains experimental (worth a study I'm sure though).
One psychedelic is an exception: the observation that ketamine actually rapidly helped some depressed patients has sparked a whole lot of research in the last decade, has led many to question the whole monoamine hypothesis behind current depression treatment, and may lead to non-psychedelic treatments that work better (or at least on a different subset) than SSRIs. (http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2170865...).
So, if you are a fan of the psychedelic experience and want to try something a bit out of the medical norms to alleviate depression, the ketamine clinic has the most medically backed potential at the moment, in my opinion (although I'll add that from what I understand ketamine clinic treatment is not at all similar to recreational usage as the dosage is much less). Alternatively, you could wait for the non-psychedelic versions or even rather unrelated derivatives (mentioned above) to progress, that for all we know might actually be better in the end. As the Economist article rightly alludes to, the brain is a seriously complex organism, and science has not reached a neat simple conclusion about depression yet.
I suffered from depression pretty much my entire 20's, and looking back it felt like the long line of anti-depressants I was prescribed exacerbated the situation. Eventually I changed how I live my life and started making baby steps towards improving myself. And I magically stopped being depressed. I have no doubt there are people out there that need help with medication. But I think the only thing that could have helped me was someone reaching out and showing me how to get out of my rut. But even then it would have been on me to make some changes and find out what makes me happy.
Ayahuasca literally turned my entire life around. I was negative, weak willed, and had a perspective that I was incompetent and my life was pointless and leading nowhere. The self the drug let me see was beautiful and powerful, it showed me that all I had to do was basically stand up and claim that persona. Fast forward a few years, I'm hyper successful in basically every area of my life, I'm on a rocket upward trajectory, and I'm totally happy/fulfilled. I put a lot of work in to change, but I needed that peek behind the veil to get "unstuck."
The only things that come close to that are the psychedelics -- psilocybin, MDMA, LSD, etc. They have been outlawed but of course, the underground therapy community has been keeping them alive and we should see legalization for the treatment of things like PTSD within the next 5 years.