No worries, it’s tough out here.

Feel free to dm me if you need to chat or want advice on anything

I’d say either or both. If you have a GP it might help to talk to them as well. While mental health may not be their field I’m sure they’d be willing to help.

I’m between GP’s at the moment and went to my neurologist. I was very upfront with him about my mental health reasons for taking time and they were my main concern. I do have a seizure disorder and had one ~3 weeks before my leave but made it clear that I believed it was stress induced due to my job and mental health status.

He disagreed about the stress being a factor in my seizure but said that if my mental health was as I depicted he had no issue authorizing my leave despite it not being his direct field. He set me up with a therapist in his hospital system for a ASAP sessions and i worked out a regular therapy schedule. My psychiatrist wasn’t much help and consistently tells me that he is medication management and not really about diagnosis, but more so for medicating a diagnosis from a psychologist. Really weird and a system I am working out of. Oddly enough my therapist and I have decided to reduce my medication to zero (not there yet) to help with some side effect overlap from my seizure meds.

Help is out there, seek it. It may seem daunting but it’s better than suffering in silence, I promise you.

ETA: my leave was officially designated by my neurologist for mental health reasons and as far as my work was concerned it was a medical leave.

Apply for aid from the state ASAP! I took a leave recently for medical/mental health reasons and it was fully approved with dr referral(who i saw after my leave began). That said my company’s leave consultant (outsourced company) deducted available state benefits from their payout and won’t pay without a denial from the state.

I’m still waiting to hear back from the state ~6weeks after my missed check that I was expecting from the company. They never told me about this policy and I still likely wouldn’t have been paid by the state in time given how long it’s taken and my dr’s insistence that the leave was the appropriate course of action.

This is just my personal experience and not set in stone advice, just a recommendation to apply for leave with the state in congruence to whatever benefits your job offers (if any). I ultimately used pto and sick pay to cover my loses and got a check cut by my company to keep me whole in the meantime.

No matter what you should take the leave of you need it and have the means to get by. Don’t toil until breaking, it will only make it worse, imo. A month off did wonders for my state of mind and I am a much more effective worker because of it.