I wondered if anyone out there could give some advice. I'm currently about to enter the 4th year of my PhD and I just don't know how I'm going to continue. I think I've had a pretty tough few years and now I'm just exhausted and sick of my PhD. To briefly summarise: In my first year I had one week's worth of training from the postdoc who was meant to be looking out for me before she went on a year's sabbatical. She only told me a few days before she left. After that, I was pretty mmuch struggling in the lab on my own trying to figure out what the hell I was doing (I didn't have any experience in the technique before starting). Several months in, my friend and flatmate died suddenly and I took a couple of weeks off, then tried to get back to work because I was worried I was falling behind. I couldn't get the experiments to work and pretty much reached the end of my tether. My boss finally stepped in and gave me something else to do (unrelated to my PhD project but which was technically simpler to try to get me some data whilst we tried to work out what to do with my project. This was mostly a bit of data analysis from someone else's experiments and there's not enough to make it a full PhD project). In my second year I agreed to try the experiments again with the help of another postdoc and we had some small success, but then I found that a group in America had pretty much done my entire project but much better than me, and it felt hopeless to continue. By this time I was in my third year and panicking about my lack of data. I decided that perhaps I ought to change direction and work more with my secondary supervisor (who until then had very little input). Initially I was feeling very positive about the change in direction, but since then everything has gone downhill. Since January both my grandmother and mother have had to be rushed to hospital, my sister had a psychiatric breakdown and has been in and out of hospital, and my long term boyfriend (of 6 yrs) broke up with me. I've been so stressed that I haven't been concentrating on my work and I've screwed up a lot of experiments/data analysis. I know the new boss is angry with me (I overheard her bitching to my old boss about how useless I am) and I don't know how to fix things. I haven't been sleeping, I've been crying all the time and I know I'm not getting the work done and just confirming the boss's opinion of me. I feel completely overwhelmed, my self confidence is shattered and can't see myself ever completing as I have very little data. What should I do?