Karina Antram was mid-conversation with her boss when she suddenly found herself unable to string a sentence together. An HR executive at a large management consultancy in the City, she had been sleeping badly, and was plagued by panic attacks, muscular pains and waves of nausea. “While I was talking to her, it felt like my mind and my body were completely separate,” Antram recalls. “My brain felt like cotton wool.”
She was sent to her work’s occupational psychologist, who asked whether she’d heard of burnout. After two weeks off, she struggled on for another few months before resigning — and going straight into another series of high-level roles at private equity firms, where, unsurprisingly, “the same thing happened again”.
Eventually, Antram was diagnosed with
