I know this comment was meant to be facetious, but this is actually how many people spiral into addiction. Recreational drugs feel like they're "working" when they make the person's problems temporarily disappear, but in reality the person hasn't solved anything. When the problems inevitably return, the temptation is to reach for more drugs. Tolerance is real, though, so people tend to reach for escalating doses over time. The cumulative effects of drug abuse and avoidance behavior begin to add up, compounding the original problems and digging the person into an even deeper hole.

That's why these successful programs are always therapy-first, rather than drug-first. The focus is first on identifying and fixing problems, using drugs to potentially amplify the therapy rather than avoid the problems.

Sadly, most of these studies lack any control groups (e.g. therapy-only) to compare against. If you look at the graphs in the study, patients were already reporting massive improvements after the first 3 therapy sessions, before taking any MDMA at all. Unfortunately, I don't think we can draw any conclusions about the MDMA in this study other than it didn't appear to make things worse when it was introduced.