I recently discovered that there is this university employee counseling thing. Also the ombudsman of the department is the biggest enemy of my superviser. I'm sorry that it is so stupid. But it is my thesis year and I don't dare to deal with such stuff. But maybe I should just send an email to the counseling. At least fhe demons will go away.

Thanks for letting me know pm133

I wish you a lot of patience during these tough times with your supervisor and PhD. I'm also suffering from a horrible supervisor-PhD student relationship for 4 years almost. I've lost many things in life because of this PhD. One thing I regret the most is the fact that I didn't come up for my own rights and showed my stance on time. Now I'm almost finished and it doesn't have any meaning anymore. I highly suggest you to speak up for yourself and make your point. If you can voice this in a professional manner (never snap at your supervisor) and say how disturbing the situation for you is, your supervisor might take a step back. I think you shouldn't feel trapped there. Keep other options open. Options of going to somewhere else is also totally OK. I have many friends who left PhD and nevery looked back. You are valuable as your own and if your supervisor is not getting this, then it is a horrible place to work for you. Or maybe it is a sign that this is not your line of work. We are not meant to be able to work at every work place with every boss. You have personal traits and your relationship with your boss/supervisor must be healthy as well. It is just like staying in a very abusive and destructive relationship. Sometimes life brings us into unexpectedly harsh conditions, but we need to remain in contact with ourselves, and eventually change or reshape that environment.
Good luck

Dear forum users,

I'd be very thankful if you share an opinion or a similar experience.

I'm in the 4th year of my PhD in engineering northwest Europe (I'm not European, came here for PhD). I've never expected this to be easy. When I started, I was very motivated and showed a quite good academic records during my Master's (published 5 journals). Since my beginning here, I've been shocked to receive no guidance, and have pressure put on me to build a huge and complex experimental setup from scratch. Two senior PhDs entitled to supervise me just ignored me and officially said that they don't want to help. I thought this is normal because nobody helps no one here and people don't like it when you ask questions. Everybody seemed to be OK with what they are doing, and publishing a lot of papers. I don't even mention the racism. The topics were new to me and I tried so hard to prove myself by reading, working hard non-stop for years. And eventually I could achieve nothing and got probation for a last chance. I finished up some side-project which is very loosely connected to my PhD and save up my a**. But under pressure of building a setup by myself I made some quick faulty engineering decisions for which I'm paying the price for, in my work and private life.

The goddamn machine is not working, I dunno why. I hate it so much. I don't have any interest anymore. I hate this place and horrible people. They are robots. I'm stuck in another country with this commitment surrounded with a feeling of shame and failure. I'm trying to find solutions, asking around. Nobody knows anything about my work and cannot help anymore. Its engineering, there are a lot of details. Hoping for a miracle. I want to burn whole faculty, or run away to Antarctica, or worse. Anyone has similar experience of failure or pre-failure?
Thank you and peace