Back when I worked IT (1981-2001), I occasionally would get extremely burned out and/or fed up and quit my job, knowing it would take me six months (more or less) to get another job (because I didn’t look for about 2 months, then wouldn’t look real hard for another 2…)
Looking back, I worked IT about 17 of those 20 years, the rest being time between jobs.
Would NOT recommend doing so in the current economic climate.
I think you should ask yourself two questions:
What is the worst that could happen if you quit your job?
What is the worst that could happen if you don’t quit your job?
I left my profession for good in 1994 for the same reasons. I was stressing out, I was self-medicating with alcohol, and it just wasn’t enjoyable to me any more. I now own my own business, set my own hours, and enjoy what I am doing. I make much less than I made before, but the upside more than makes up for it.
Taking time off may be a good thing, as others have said, you have to be cautious though. Employers in the USA cannot ask you WHAT is wrong with you, but they do have a right to confirm with your doctor you are in fact ill.
Thus they can’t ask you why you’re taking the time off, but they can require a doctor’s note for you to leave and to return to work.
The FMLA allows up to 12 weeks of leave per year. This is usually unpaid, and the employer can require you use up all your sick/vacation time toward those 12 weeks.
Upon return the FMLA does NOT guarantee you’ll get your job back. Employers should try to return you to you old position, but obviously this isn’t always possible. So they must return you to A position of similar status and same pay.
The main problem you have is nothing is going to change. The OP stated as such. Your job will still be there and IF it is the cause of your health issues, as soon as you go back you’re gonna be right back to square one.
While you take time off, you’re going to have to learn how to deal with your stess. It’s not like you’re gonna take time off and upon return all the problems will go away. It could be worse. What if you take a month off and no one does your job for a month? Then when you return you’re now a month behind in your work.
So it’s important when you take time off to repair from the stress, you get some sort of behaviour therapy or stress reduction classes so that in the future you can cope with your problem. Or use the time off to look for a new job.
I resigned from a toxic job and took three months off before starting to look for a new job. This was a few years ago, when the economic/employment situation was a lot better where I lived back then. It was exactly what I needed, gave me some breathing space before a fresh start in a new company. Never regretted it.
I’ve considered taking time off for stress but I’ve always wondered - if you’re that fucked up by your job, how do you feel as the return date approaches? Wouldn’t the prospect of getting back to work be horrifically daunting?
At the moment, I just have one guy helping me… for now. Some things he can’t do because he’s had a heart attack a few years ago and isn’t allowed to do much heavy lifting.
Let me add this; for some odd reason, my boss seems to want to terminate all of my help when the weather gets warm. Once Summer hits, I’m working alone in areas where the indoor temperature can reach as high as 130. That’s not counting in the heat index which can make these areas as high as 140+.
When it gets that hot, I have to carry bottles of ice water with me. I refill them constantly all night, yet have suffered from dehydration. Was even hospitalized one time for severe dehydration.
Can’t take the frequent breaks that is suggested when it’s that hot because I have so much area to cover nightly.
I drive a used golf cart that has a top speed of 4mph. I drive as much as 20+ miles most nights in that piece of crap of a cart.
Try driving it during the winter when the wind chill is hovering around 0 and there is no cover for the cart!
My boss recently added more work. I now have to cover 98 restrooms every night. When I say I have my head in the crapper all of the time, I’m not joking! 
I think that for now, I can’t reduce my hours, because of the money. I crunched some numbers and it would be very, very tight. And that is stressful in itself. I will apply for a couple of other jobs and see what happens. Even if I don’t necessarily want to switch jobs, it’ll be nice to know that I have options. Knowing I could go somewhere else will make me feel less stuck. And I don’t think taking some leave will really do any long-term good, for all the reasons some of you have brought up.Taking time off is nice, but if I’m going right back to a situation that hasn’t improved, it won’t help.
The main plan right now is to talk to the boss and explain that the current situation is not sustainable and it’s affecting my health, and if we can’t ease up a little on the pressure, I may need to think about looking for another job. I don’t want to go elsewhere, but I also don’t want to find myself on blood pressure medication in my 30s. I have the next two days off (because I work the weekend - hooray), and I’ll spend them figuring out what I need to say to her. I don’t just want to go in and start whining about being stressed out - I want to be able to say: “Here is the problem. Here is why it IS a problem. And here are some things I think may fix it - what do you think we can do about it?” Having a few days off before seeing her will help me sort it out, I think.
The real issue is that their answer is always “we’re trying to get us fully staffed, and once that happens everything will be ok”. But we are never fully staffed. And it’s only going to get worse as people retire and the shortage of new grads starts affecting the profession across the country. We need to figure out how we can realistically handle things, and have a sort of emergency plan to implement if we’re too short. When we’re working with a skeleton crew, maybe certain tasks can be handed off to the day shift, or our official turnaround times can be extended, or certain tests can be batched instead of doing them as they come in. the trouble is they’re expecting us to provide the exact same level of service whether there are 6 of us or 4 of us. And that’s just not realistic.
So I have some thinking to do. I also know I need to work on how I deal with stress. That’s an ongoing effort.
If I so much as mention the name of the company I work for, I run a very good chance of being terminated. I’m pretty sure my boss has probably been reading my posts here, waiting for me to slip up somewhere. Even if I’m posting from home, the company likes to snoop on your personal life.
It sounds to me like the isolation is really getting to you. If you are a social person, this can be a big problem. It sucks to feel like life is passing you by while you are stuck alone missing out on it.
Is there any way at all to address that?
I dropped almost all my classes one semester for mental health reasons. Though I’m finding breaks only help me during the break. Each summer I think I’ve finally gone sane, and each fall I resume freaking out…
So if you quit, you might be poor. If you don’t quit, you might be dead.
Need more time to think?
After the holidays, I’m cutting back on the overtime and just work my regular hours. If my boss isn’t happy with that, then he can either fire me or just find some other peon to the extra work.
My wife and I have been discussing lately of my quitting my job, even though I bring in the most income. We are exploring different options of where to cut back on living expenses.
Antigen, I feel your pain! I’ve been going through the same thing for a couple of years (except I work for a high-end travel company). We’re a “boutique” company, which means we’re a small office, and we give very personalized attention. There has been a major overhaul of staff in the past year, which has made things both better and worse (we lost several highly-skilled people and hired a few barely-qualified replacements who we now have to train - another time drainer). I’ve been telling my superiors for years that we need more staff, and that we are losing bookings because we are understaffed. Meanwhile, they keep saying that if we get our sales up, we will be able to add staff. Our systems are completely inefficient (completely!), which makes the whole situation even more unbearable. Everyone at the office is on edge all the time, lots of drama and complaining, routine meltdowns occurring, and it’s downright unbearable.
So, after a year of internal-pep-talks and reminding myself that I’m not nearly as trapped as I feel most of the time – I’ve applied to school to do something in a field I truly love, science. Ironically, I’ve applied to the Medical Technology program at my local university. 
*side note: I’d love to talk to you more about your job at some point if you’d be open to it. I have zip experience in the field, and a very weak chemistry background. I need to learn more about Med Tech before I can be sure I’m on the right path. Luckily I have time to figure that out (although I’m almost 30 - so I feel like my career-clock is ticking). *
Anyway, what I came on here to say was (what some of the others have said): if you’re prepared to look for another job anyway, but the prospect of that doesn’t really thrill you (why would it?!), then I think you should tell your boss that you’re considering leaving. Odds are they really don’t want to lose you, and since they know you’re good, they probably respect your opinion too. You can present it to them this way: they’re probably going to have to hire someone else either way: to keep you, or to take your place when you leave! :dubious:
Whatever you decide to do, good luck and godspeed!
Not to mention that when you boss needs to get your job done, they’ll get some perspective.
Tell them to recruit some more Canadians. 
Seriously, good luck.
That sounds like a good plan, Antigen. My only comment would be to make sure that you don’t get sucked into a vague discussion of how the lab is working on making things better in general like you describe; you need to make sure things get better for YOU. I’d say they need to give you concrete reassurances with actual dates on them for it to mean anything.
That’s the hard part. I’m so unused to asking for anything for myself. But this needs to happen. I will try to be a little more self-centered in the interest of self-preservation.
That’s what’s known as “healthy selfishness.”
When I graduated business school, I had quit my job in my last semester so I could go full time. I already had a job lined up, but they pushed our start date back a few months. This was 2001 and companies were deferring or recinding offers so I got them to pay me my signing bonus up front, under the fairly truthful guise that I didn’t really expect to not be working for 4 months.
It was pretty awesome having 4 months off but the first week was a little weird. I was used to working a full time schedule at a real job on top of a full time courseload in the evenings AND having a regular social life that included a Vermont ski house. So for the first week I had this nagging that I was supposed to be somewhere doing something, but then eventually I realized didn’t have to do shit until September.
A couple I’ve been friends and coworkers with for the past six years just up and quit their jobs. They seem pretty happy.
I’m the kind of person who has trouble fighting for herself but will organize, fight and win WWIII so long as it’s for others. You’re not fighting this fight for you: you’re fighting it for the patients who deserve the best possible care and for the medical personnel who need correct results in a timely fashion. Keep that in mind, both to help keep your spine straight and as a possible card to play.