My personal burnout – Lessons learned

Burnout is a stress disorder, as is PTSD, but trauma is typically not involved. Indeed, the lack of trauma is often why burnout sneaks up on people so easily. At least with PTSD you often have some "big event" that you can track things back to that is something that most people would say "ok, that's something that can be life altering". But you can burnout even if you're working only 20 hours a week at a "fun" job and earning 6 figures a year. Burnout is caused by stress, PTSD is stress and other symptoms caused by trauma. They share some similar symptoms because they both involve stress, but they are not the same. Removing the stress and spending time relaxing usually helps clear up burnout to a substantial degree, but the stress in PTSD is caused by the memory of trauma that happened in the past, and that doesn't go away, it's internal not external. Additionally, PTSD is not only harder to tackle it's also typically more life altering because it has much more severe symptoms (arousal, hypervigilance, constant reliving of the trauma, guilt, being easily startled, etc.)

Post traumatic stress disorder - trauma. Coding is not trauma and can't be compared to trauma.

To try another angle, do you have a mentor/supervisor? If not, maybe look out for some experienced (potentially retired) manager that you trust. There are also professional services in that space. They may not know your business, but they know the responsibility you feel for keeping things alive.

They might be able to help with the culture shift issue you mentioned elsewhere but also with management in general (including "how to make sure that the company doesn't have a bus factor of 1: me") and self-care - one low key strategy in that regard might be to hold you accountable to certain habits that you agreed on (eg. "eat twice a day").

Speaking of which: got something to eat yet?

The rest of my post is some advice, but please feel free to ignore it if it's not wanted.

You say you would consider treatment, but that you have two worries. 1) That they would detain you under section 2) that they would subject you to treatment against your will

1) Detention under section:

There's no chance you'll be detained under section of the mental health act unless you have a definite plan to die by suicide and you intend to act on it soon. And even then it probably wouldn't happen. Currently there just aren't enough beds available, for one thing.

The other reason is that most trusts should have moved to a "crisis resolution and home treatment team" model. These teams provide short term interventions and are specifically designed to keep people out of hospital - we know that hospital in-patient stays tend to make things worse, not better. You would do most of your work with a community treatment team with CRHTT help when needed.

2) Forced treatment:

Mental health treatment is very different today than it was 15 years ago. The Mental Capacity Act came in in 2005, so it wouldn't be possible for them to detain you under section and take out your womb (if you had one) today unless there were very unusual circumstances. Here's a case where a man who lacked capacity in some areas was deemed to have enough capacity to make a medical decision that resulted in his death: https://ukhumanrightsblog.com/2015/10/13/court-of-protection... That's a gruesome case but I hope it shows that forcing treatment only happens under certain circumstances. There are some powers under MCA and MHA to force medication, but those are not common.

Nationally less than 10% of people under secondary specialist MH care ever go inpatient. Something like 92% of people in secondary care get that care in the community - either at their home or by appointment in a clinic. It would be unusual to force someone outside hospital to take treatment. There are community treatment orders, but they tend to be a justice system thing and not a mental health system thing.

If you did decide that treatment would help you might want to look at the various guides to the Mental Health Act. (Mind do one; Rethink do one; the Government does a nice guide too.) Then:-

Make an advanced directive; work out who your "nearest relative"[1] is (and then change that to someone you trust, and make sure that person knows to always say "I object to the section" to the AMHP if anyone does ever talk about detention under section (although that's really unlikely)); then go see someone.

If you think a short form talking therapy would help you should be able to self refer, or you might need to get a referral from your GP to "IAPT" (Improving access to psychological therapies".

If you think you would benefit from long form therapy, well, those waiting lists are very long pretty much everywhere. Some places are maybe 6 weeks for assessment and then 18 weeks to start treatment. Other places are much longer. The sooner you start the referral process the sooner you'll get to see someone. You'd go via your GP, then probably to a gateway team. (Although this process varies across the country).

Or you could just go privately. That could be expensive (£30 to £50 per session is reasonable). But it gives you some more control. You might want to check professional registration - BACP is often recommended. I'd stll recommend the advance directive stuff and the nearest relative stuff.

[1] this is a person defined in law and they have some power, so it's important to have someone that you really trust.

Feynman was deemed mentally unfit for military service when he was quite fine.

Don't think making yourself literally insane is the best way to help those people.

I'll second the recommendation of stopping with the coffee. And seek help. (And no, choices do exist - we are not completely free, but not completely unfree either. You can make your life better.)